Strangely satisfying

Delightful: 'Michael Wolf/William Eggleston, $11.50' (2011)

The prize for novelty in process among the photographs at this year’s London Art Fair goes to Opus Art of Newcastle, who are showing something called “illusion knitting” by Tanja Boukal. These are images knitted in such a way that seen from the front they show only black and white stripes but from an angle a photograph appears. The technique is new to me but the pictures that have been made in this way are unfortunately trite – not much more than T-shirt art.

Among the more serious displays, Giles Baker Smith (GBS Fine Art) shows, in his words, paintings that look like photographs and photographs that look like paintings. This concept stretches a long way: he is showing, for example, a delightful pair of Japanese theatre masks, one made to look like a Munch and one like a Velázquez. He represents Natasha Kerr, who describes herself as a “photographic textile artist”. That might just be another way of saying “mixed media” but in fact she makes interesting and often seductive narrative pieces.

Smith has recently sold a good series of Emily Allchurch’s Tokyo pictures. Allchurch is about as painterly as a photographer can be and if her pieces are selling well there is hope yet for good sense in the market, as Allchurch researches hard and makes beautifully.

I liked a few pieces by Helen Sear too, from a series called “Sightlines”, the third or fourth series I have come across recently in which photographs are made on gesso, an oddly antique material. The “Sightlines” pieces are odd for another reason: portraits of women whose faces are hidden behind porcelain birds. Strange, but compelling and somehow good.

Troika editions are showing a patchy group of pictures by Bill Jackson from several interconnected series. It needs a little editing, and collectors should switch their quality filters to “high”, but they will find much of interest. “Relics” is a curiously pleasing set of very plain pictures of antiques-markety stuff, presented with a scientific cool that belies a warm pleasure in the way that objects invite viewers to imagine stories around them.

Purdy Hicks have good photography as always: Tom Hunter and Susan Derges are both represented artists. I think I saw only one of the fabulous set the gallery showed some time ago by Jorma Puranen, in which he photographed paintings as we so often see them – blotched and veiled by the reflections of the exhibition lights. Puranen – a senior Finnish photographer – may be unfamiliar but he is a master and it is always worth bearing with some of his obscurities in order to let his pieces grow: they do so most gloriously.

Puranen, like several other photographers represented in the gallery booths, is also included in a display curated by Sue Steward under the title of “The New Alchemists”. The London Art Fair takes photography seriously and has benefited from the void left by the disappearance of Photo-London in 2008. It hosts, for example, a whole day of seminars on photography. It is an art fair, however, and although photography is everywhere within it, it is more often than not cloaked in some way. Few creators are acknowledged as photographers; artists-who-work-with-photographs is the camouflage expression of the day. This is what “The New Alchemists” seeks to address, by looking at some of the ways in which the photographic surface itself can be manipulated so as no longer to be “merely” a photograph.

Photographers and artists have been doing this kind of thing for years. Think of Gerhard Richter, so comprehensively revealed to Londoners recently at Tate. Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” was photography reworked, after all. There even used to be something in the mid-1980s called British Manipulated Photography – not a school exactly, but a number of artists who shared a sense that “straight” photography had been taken over by a particular kind of documentary and that there must be more to it than that. The stars then were very considerable artists: Mari Mahr and Calum Colvin, even Victor Burgin and a number of others.

Among the recent crop, David Gibson has made pictures in which, as he puts it, two languages clash. By manipulating the digital coding that underlies pictures he makes them stutter over big historical and emotional questions. These are fascinating but don’t quite work as pictures: consider them an early work in progress.

Here are also a couple of examples from the delightful series in which Michael Wolf has asked Shenzhen street painters to copy famous photographs and then photographed them holding the copies. His William Eggleston tricycle given this treatment is touching, funny and more than a little thought-provoking. I like a pair of black-and-white landscapes by Aliki Braine too, in which the central trees have been blotted out by clipping the negative with an office hole-punch. The resultant overlapping circles are droll: they are tree-shaped. It’s a mixed group, this, but full of interest.

The same can be said for the fair as a whole. It is notably weaker in photographs than it has been in the past. Less daring as regards the new, yet with fewer outstanding older pieces brought out of gallery storerooms: conservatism and caution are everywhere and a high proportion of the works on show are decorative pieces for interior designers. But still – full of interest.

The London Art Fair 2012 ends on January 22 www.londonartfair.co.uk