NEW YORK—In celebration of its 30th anniversary, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) is paying homage to innovation in the medium at its annual show this year. For “Innovation: An Exhibition Within an Exhibition,” each exhibitor at the fair was asked to select one image from their offerings that represents a milestone in photography — “from daguerreotype to digital,” as newly elected AIPAD president Stephen Bulger describes it. The works were then collected chronologically in a small catalog produced by Aperture and called out with special signage throughout the show, taking place at the Park Avenue Armory through Sunday.

The brainchild of gregarious Chelsea photo dealer W.M. Hunt, the initiative was driven by a longtime “frustration with the schizophrenic nature of the fair,” which some see as divided between vintage prints and forward-thinking contemporary work, with a gulf in between. “I wanted to give context to the contemporary stuff,” he told ARTINFO. “Make it all of a piece.”

Perhaps inevitably, though, the split was still in evidence among the fair’s 70-some booths, with splashy, mostly large-format new works distracting from the smaller gems in abundance. But in this rough economy, it’s those black-and-white treasures, often tucked away in the furthest corners of the booths, that seem to be moving, if slowly.

People feel safer right now investing in “things that have stood the test of time,” according to Magdalena Zopf of Paris’s Serge Plantureux. Most of the dealers ARTINFO spoke with agreed, and indeed, Plantureux’s booth, filled to the brim with quality vintage images, boasted a few red dots on ARTINFO’s opening-day visit: Two film stills dated 1940–44 from Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland, showing gypsies “borrowed” from a concentration camp for the shoot, then returned afterward, had gone for $6,000; and a 1930 shot by Evgueni Yavno of Stalin, his son, and several comrades had sold for $22,000. Zopf said that things were “still moving” and that when it comes to vintage photography, people “will do what they can to buy the things they love.”

By contrast, New York’s Bruce Silverstein Gallery was showcasing its younger photographers, with the outside of its booth dominated by a new work by New York–based Maria Antonietta Mameli: Human Observation — Grand Central Station #10 (2008), a 40-by-48-inch print priced at $6,000, in an edition of 3 plus 2 artist proofs. Mameli’s spartan, isolated figures made a splash at the fair last year, and Human Observation, like the earlier work, similarly spotlights a figure in motion — here a woman in a red dress and heels — this time masking the surroundings in a sea of black rather than white. Still, the sales the gallery had to report when ARTINFO stopped by were from its stock of vintage prints, running in the $5,000-to-$10,000 range.

On the higher end was New York dealer Robert Miller, whose booth boasted six Walker Evans Africana images from his 1935 project with the Museum of Modern Art, a vintage print of Diane Arbus’s Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th St. (1966), a series of 1978 Sigmar Polke images from his “Indians” series, a stunning Bill Henson portrait of a child (this one dressed), and a unique Jeff Wall test print of Man in the Street from 1985 priced near the top of the AIPAD spectrum, at $125,000. There was interest in several of the works on display but “no bites at this point,” a gallery representative said.

Miller wasn’t alone. One dealer, when asked what she’d sold, replied: “Off the record? Nothing. On the record? Nothing.”

That said, gallerists seemed mostly optimistic about the fair, saying that the crowd on opening night had been “the right crowd,” with lots of curators, photo editors, and important collectors.

Eric Franck of London was taking the long view, emphasizing that the fair is also about meeting people and setting exhibitions and book deals in motion. “If one does sell, one is always happy,” he said, “but that is not the main objective.” He was showcasing images from Lottie Davies, among them Quints (2008), which recently won the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize from London's National Portrait Gallery. Part of an intended 12-work series titled “Memories and Nightmares,” the picture, priced at $4,000 and measuring 16 3/4 by 39 3/8 inches in an edition of 10, depicts a friend’s nightmare that she would have quintuplets. It hadn’t sold yet, but two editions of another work in the series, The Day My Brother Was Born, had, at the same price.