Is Pittsburgh an untapped market for photography collecting? Collector Evan Mirapaul asked this question last spring by organizing the first PGH Photo Fair, a pop-up event held in the gymnasium of what was once the East Liberty YMCA. The latest of several projects relating to photography that has emerged recently in the city, the PGH Photo Fair speaks to increased linkages between the local photo community and international networks.

The YMCA gym is a dramatic space, and the photo fair feels like a secret; it’s been years since the public has seen the inside of this building. Work lights positioned along running circuits above the gymnasium floor push warmth down onto the floor below. Colourful layers of paint speak of the building’s vintage and history. East Liberty, once the third-largest transportation hub in Pennsylvania and choked by redevelopment in the 1960s, is gradually being revitalized as a twenty-first-century work and leisure zone. The YMCA is to be developed into a boutique hotel but, for the time being, the building remains unoccupied and the temporary appearance of the photo fair evokes a sense of possibilities, both for East Liberty and for photography in Pittsburgh.

The PGH Photo Fair has provided a convivial meeting point for the Pittsburgh photography community, individual collectors and institutional collectors from the region. With few commercial galleries in the city, the fair presents an opportunity to speak with experts and to handle prints directly. The event has billed itself, in part, as a chance for the public to educate itself about collecting photography; accordingly, there are many vintage black-and-white prints from the mid-twentieth century on hand – physically manageable, materially beautiful, established in value and imminently accessible.

Four galleries from New York, Toronto and Chicago are present. Tom Gitterman cheerfully removes the sleeves from vintage prints so that they can be viewed directly. Stephen Bulger shows prints from Dave Heath’s classic book A Dialogue With Solitude (2000). Heath was his teacher and Bulger brings both a personal and professional perspective to the work. Paul Berlanga has brought a large selection of Photo League and School of Design prints from Stephen Daiter Gallery, and a small group of photographs of Pittsburgh made by Alfred Watson in the 1940s. L. Parker Stephenson speaks with visitors about Raphael Dallaporta and his colour landmine photographs. The Aperture Foundation is here, as is the Pittsburgh photography art bookshop and project space, Spaces Corners.

For many years, as Pittsburgh settled into its satellite status to the larger seaboard cities, the city offered a stable and vibrant, if somewhat isolated, environment for photography and the visual arts. Recently, however, interest in photography has increased and diversified in a way that makes Pittsburgh increasingly a node rather than a peripheral. The city’s leafy and inexpensive neighbourhoods, and the quality of life if offers, steadily attract an influx of returnees and new residents – many of them working in the arts, and many keeping one foot in New York and the other in Western Pennsylvania. With them, new initiatives have materialized; over the last six years F295, the global community of ‘alternative processes’ photographers, has convened in Pittsburgh five times for programmes and workshops. The ADP Workshop, bringing together documentary photographers committed to extended community-based projects, relocated to Pittsburgh in 2012. And Spaces Corners, with a storefront down the road in Lawrenceville, offers a specialist selection of small press and limited edition photography books.

Pittsburgh’s longtime nonprofit anchors continue to provide both practical support and exhibition opportunities. Pittsburgh Filmmakers Center for the Arts provides courses for many of the city’s colleges and universities. The Silver Eye Center for Photography has sharpened its focus on important and emerging world-class photographers through its fellowship and exhibition programmes. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents consistently strong exhibitions of contemporary art and photography including both regional and international work. The Carnegie Museum of Art is increasingly engaged with photography through its contemporary art and photography departments, and with the Carnegie International.

The PGH Photo Fair, then, offers an interesting litmus test. Like other recent projects it asks: what is possible in Pittsburgh that was not possible ten years ago? And the photo fair differs from other, nonprofit endeavours; even as it serves as an educational function, it is principally concerned with the collection (rather than creation), exhibition and teaching of photography. Connecting Pittsburgh with the international photography marketplace, the PGH Photo Fair, set to return in 2013, could potentially serve collectors and give regional photographers access to galleries, growing an underdeveloped aspect of the Pittsburgh arts ecosystem.