BASEL.- A dozen distinguished international specialists in vintage photography from the USA, Britain, France, Germany, and Canada have been selected by the Art Basel Committee to take part in the 37th edition of the international art show. They will be showing rare masterpieces of what is, in comparison with painting and sculpture, still a young artistic genre. Over the past twenty years, vintage photography has become a popular collecting area, assuming importance in both private and public collections. Art Basel was the first art fair to give vintage photography a forum, in the context of the 150th anniversary of photography in 1989. Since then it has become the leading show for this artistic medium. This is the first year that Edwynn Houk (Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York) has served as expert consultant to the Art Basel Committee.

The presentation of Corkin Shopland Gallery (Toronto) centers on the way vintage photographers like André Kertész, Edward Weston, George Platt Lynes, Dora Maar, Brancusi, and Brassaï deal with the human body. Whether dismembered, posed, or distorted, the body has fascinated whole generations of photographers, including the meanwhile classic American artists Nan Goldin and Larry Clark.

The Stephen Daiter Gallery (Chicago) will be presenting a series of portraits taken in Europe and the USA from the 1920s to the 1970s. There is a large portrait of Grock the Clown by Lotte Jacobi from the thirties, a picture of Truman Capote by Irving Penn from the forties, and a picture of Norman Mailer by Robert Frank from the sixties. Also on display and for sale are an early print of a portrait of James Joyce by Bernice Abbottaus, a portrait of Helene Weigel by Herbert List from the seventies, and a series of 20 portraits by Ken Ohara from his 1970 book project «One».The booth will also feature works by Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto from the seventies and eighties and works by André Kertész, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Gyorgy Kepes, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy from the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design in Chicago.

The Fraenkel Gallery (San Francisco) will, for the very first time, be bringing together the complete series of «The Little Screens» by American photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934). Made at the beginning of the sixties, these narratively conceived works highlight both the melancholy and the comic sides of American daily life: street scenes, everyday objects, and human portraits.

Galerie Kicken Berlin will be showing a selection of rare masterpieces of 20th-century European photographic history at its booth. Among them is a group of 24 original prints from the «Jews and Arabs» cycle shot by avant-garde photographer Helmar Lerski between 1931 and 1935. Lerski (1870-1956), who worked as a cameraman for expressionist films in Berlin in the twenties, represented an extreme position in the artistic exploration of the human image. His works very rarely appear on the market. Last year the Fotomuseum Winterthur devoted a one-man show to photographs by the artist, who spent a large part of his life in Switzerland and died in Zurich in 1956. The highlight of this year's booth is an «icon» of photography by André Kertész. The price of this exquisite picture from the twenties is likely to be far over a million euros. Galerie Kicken Berlin marks its thirtieth anniversary by showing this work, which it placed in a leading collection decades ago.

Hans P. Kraus, JR. Fine Photographs (New York) will present a selection of photographs by artists who started out as painters. A number of prominent French and British artists took up the new art form of photography in the course of their careers, partly as a study aid for their paintings and partly to create independent works of art in what was then a new medium. The exhibition features works by William Henry Fox Talbot, Anna Atkins, Reverend Calvert Jones, Hill & Adamson, Roger Fenton, Giacomo Caneva, Gustave Le Gray, Eugène Atget, Edward Steichen, and others.

The pieces presented by the Laurence Miller Gallery (New York) this year range from a selection of vintage works by famous photographers to photographic works from China that have never been shown before. There will be a box of 10 photographs by Diane Arbus on display: a rare limited edition personally selected by the artist shortly before she committed suicide in 1971. The edition contains such famous photographs as «Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I., 1963», «A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970», «Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967» and «A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968». Among the small original prints from the state-run, Beijing-based New China News Agency in the sixties are propaganda images, Bauhaus-inspired abstract industrial studies, and landscape photos.

Alongside a rare 19th-century daguerreotype landscape, Galerie Françoise Paviot (Paris) will be presenting a series of 13 works by surrealist photographer Man Ray, pictures of famous artists and surrealist pieces. In homage to the late «Nouveau Réaliste» Raymond Hains, there will be 13 unfamiliar original prints from the fifties that have never been shown before. On «Professional Day» (Friday, June 16), the gallery will be showing, for the very first time, all 27 original Brassaï prints used by the French publisher Girodias to illustrate Henry Miller's book «Quiet Days in Clichy». A further premiere is the presenta-tion of Dieter Appelt's «classic», 21 photographs from the «Ezra Pound» series, for which a new publication will be available.

The Ubu Gallery from New York features works by Hans Bellmer and portraits of famous artists by avant-garde photographers. There are pictures by Hugo Erfurth (Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, and Christian Rohlfs), Sophie Taeuber-Arp (self-portrait), Lee Miller (Joseph Cornell), André Kertész (Tristan Tzara), Bruno Schuch (Otto Mueller) and Hildegard Heise (Ernst Barlach). Also on display will be works by August Sander, Kertész, Weegee and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and a number of photo collages by Alexander Rodchenko, Georges Hugnet, and Jindrich Styrsky.

Cologne-based Galerie Thomas Zander, which is at Art Basel for the first time this year, is presenting works of vintage and contemporary photography related by their media reflexivity. Going out from classic photographers associated with «New Documents» (Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand), «New Topographics» (Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel) and «New Color Photography» (William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, and Joel Meyerowitz), a panorama of the photography of the last forty years unfolds, with a particular accent on the development of conceptual photography (Victor Burgin, Larry Sultan). Following the leitmotif of the alternation between image and text on the one hand and photographic picture plane and monitor on the other, individual highlights of photographic history are thematically brought together.

The following vintage photography specialists will also be represented at Art Basel this year: Edwynn Houk Gallery (New York), Galerie 1900-2000 (Paris), and Galerie Daniel Blau (Munich).