Courtesy Galería Sandunga

Carlos Aires, "Untitled (Wolf Kid)" from the series "Happily Ever After" (2007) at Galería Sandunga

Courtesy Witzenhausen Gallery

Ixone Sádaba, "La Poétique de la Desaparition I" (2006) at Witzenhausen Gallery

Andy Warhol Starn Twins Patrick Demarchelier Sante d'Orazio Investors Indulge Appetite for Luxury Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Phillips de Pury Makes Its (Small) Mark The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway)

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The question on everyone’s mind, of course, is whether buyers will be.

Photography has certainly gotten lots of action in Miami this week, though much of that was for Photo Miami’s quasi-rival, the selling exhibition In Fashion Photo. Supermodel Naomi Campbell, the subject of a retrospective that is undoubtedly In Fashion Photo’s main draw, showed up for the vernissage on Tuesday amid a swirl of buzz. “It was mobbed: paparazzi, press, fans,” said Peter Bodnarchuk, the show’s director of sales.

By comparison, impressions at the less fashion-fabulous Photo Miami seemed mixed. Its opening night, the same as In Fashion Photo’s, saw some 1,500 people pass through the jumbo tent, but some of those were foot traffic from the adjacent Art Miami fair. Speaking with ARTINFO on Friday afternoon, Fleming said that the show, open through Sunday, had gotten off to a “decent” start, but Sylvere Azoulai, of New York’s Sous les Etoiles, was less sanguine: “It’s so-so. We expect the weekend to be more active.” His New York–based gallery was showcasing some attractive-looking boxed portfolios for prices in the low four figures. As of early Friday afternoon, he hadn’t sold any.

“The first two days were quite bleak,” admitted Juan Curto, director of Madrid’s Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte. Still, he added, it was better than the “total flop” of this year’s Art Chicago, and he did at least have one sale under his belt: an American buyer had snapped up L.A. artist Jamie Baldridge’s Ora Sacro Emblemata on Thursday for $4,000. The half-dozen or so Spanish booths at the fair were all doing about the same, Curto reported. “They have sold one or two, and have more in the pipeline.”

The mood was brighter at Santa Monica–based Robert Berman’s booth, which was selling work by American artist Cameron Gray — including three prints of Pornification of Power, a mosaic of Internet porn in the image of an American flag — at a rate of more than one a day. Nor did Berman have any trouble finding a buyer for Rue St.-Martin, a video installation by French artist Marc Fichou. “The moment we hung it, one of the most important collectors of photography in Florida fell in love with it,” Berman said during a phone interview. He was on his way to the Fort Lauderdale home of said collector, Leland Hirsch. (The gallerist declined to name the selling price, but said it was less than $10,000.)

A few trends have emerged. For one, buyers are taking their time, with even the popular, big-name fashion photographers at In Fashion Photo — including Gilles Bensimon, Sante D’Orazio, and Patrick Demarchelier — having to wait it out. “The impulse buys are not there,” said the show’s Bodnarchuk. “People are doing all the fairs before they make their choice.”

One thing that is selling well, though, is political work. At Photo Miami, Berman said he’s “not surprised” that political works — including a Warhol-inspired portrait, Vote Obama, that he created in collaboration with Venice, California–based artist John Colao — are moving. “I know a lot of people have strong feelings” about the Bush administration, he said.

Several dealers at Photo Miami suggested that overall, photography isn’t suffering from the same kind of slump that so much contemporary art is going through. “The good news is that photography is very collectible now,” said Berman. “People are able to jump in at a much lower price.” Kate Stevens, director of London’s HackelBury Fine Art, concurred: “Things get overheated a lot more quickly [in the art world] than they do in the photography world.”

Sales in HackelBury’s booth were surprisingly kinetic, in fact. “We’re well over our expectations, and we’re a lot busier than last year,” Stevens reported, adding that she was seeing more collectors and curators than ever who are “really interested and serious” about buying. Twin Brooklyn artists Mike and Doug Starn’s ATL Film Still 2 went for a price in the mid-five figures, a single London collector had snapped up four Stephen Ings for prices in the $3,000–5,000 range, and Stevens had also sold to clients from Austria and Sweden. There have been “more Europeans than last year,” she noted, and local collectors seemed to be coming earlier.

For Stevens, the slackened pace that had other dealers worrying was a plus. “It’s more relaxed. The tension has gone out,” she said. That, and the fact that many of the peripheral fairs are now located nearer each other, had made the atmosphere more conducive to commerce. “People are much less tired than they were last year, when they didn’t want to leave their details and follow up. This year, I think we’re forming relationships that go a lot further,” she said.