The art fair season is already in full swing in New York, with Scope and The Armory Show, between them showcasing a rich variety of contemporary arts practice. A fortnight later, the focus is on photography, when from 29 March the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) is set to return to the Park Avenue Armory in the Upper East Side for the 32nd edition of its New York Photography Show.

Seventy-five of the world’s leading art galleries are making up the core of this year’s show covering a broad spectrum of contemporary, modern and 19th century photographic work as well as a mix of photo-based art, video and new media. This year is set to be bigger than ever, after organisers added four new exhibitors to the billing, and prepared an impressive agenda of events and discussions.

With female photographers being celebrated in a number of solo exhibitions at top museums across the world this coming year – Cindy Sherman at MoMA, Diane Arbus at Fotomuseum Switzerland, Annie Liebovitz at the Smithsonian Museum and Taryn Simon at the Helsinki Art Museum, to name just a few – it is no wonder that some of the main panel discussions at this year’s AIPAD will focus on female photographers. A conversation between Rineke Djisktra and Jennifer Blessing, curator of photography at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, will open the programme, ahead of Dijkstra’s forthcoming retrospective at the museum this summer. In the same vein, and to commemorate the major travelling retrospective of Francesca Woodman’s work, a panel discussion will see experts discuss the resonance of her work upon contemporary photography. Other highlights from the programme include a series of top curators discussing the next big trends in emerging art photography, and a seminar focused on how to collect photographs.

Highlights from the exhibition listings include specially curated exhibitions of work by earlier photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Ansel Adams, André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as a variety of modern and contemporary showcases such as those of Linda McCartney and Karen Knorr and an exclusive exhibition by David Zwirner gallery of a new body of work by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, in which he endeavours to find a balance between documentary and theatrically staged photography. There is also an exhibition of personal cards sent from photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Jerry Uelsmann.

For more details, visit www.aipad.com.