As Jeffrey Fraenkel explains, “Long Story Short is essentially a sliver of photography’s tasty pie, a tight group of objects that includes works by established masters as well as flea-market finds. Viewers may recognize many of the names, but most of the images will be surprises—and quite a few are anonymous images about which we know almost nothing. Here, in the thick of our digital era, we still believe that the physical presence of artworks can affect a person in the deepest ways.”

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Man RayUntitled [Banjo]

1923

gelatin silver print, 19-3/4 x 15-3/8 inches (image & sheet) [50.2 x 40 cm]

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Long Story Short begins with an anonymous daguerreotype, circa 1849, of a young woman holding a daguerreotype in her lap and continues with pivotal photographs by Charles Aubry, Carleton Watkins, Eugene Atget, and E.J. Bellocq. The story develops with photographs by Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and lesser-known 20th-century works by Helen Levitt, Romare Bearden, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston. The evaporation of walls separating photography and other media is reflected in more recent works by Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Mel Bochner, Wardell Milan, Elisheva Biernoff, and Liz Deschenes—artists whose work is not strictly, or not at all, photography.

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Photographer UnknownUntitled [Dinosaur Balloon]

November 25, 1969

gelatin silver print, 8 x 9-5/8 inches (sheet) [20.3 x 24.5 cm]

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Long Story Short offers a deliberate alternative to the onslaught of disposable imagery now part of everyday experience, and was conceived to reward sustained engagement. Both the exhibition and the book lead the viewer through an abbreviated tour of photography’s 180-year evolution. Fraenkel Gallery president Frish Brandt noted, “The range of artists and images provides for a vibrant first-person experience, whether seen in the gallery or in the book.”

The post Long Story Short: Anniversary Exhibition appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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The earliest work in the exhibition is Charles Clifford’s moody study of the Alhambra, circa 1858; the most recent is Lee Friedlander’s bullet-riddled “NO SHOOTING” sign, made in June 2014. Photographic objects by Sol LeWitt, Jess, Christian Marclay, and Bernd & Hilla Becher find affinities with Charles Sheeler, Helen Levitt, Thomas Eakins, and William Eggleston. A found snapshot of an all-female wedding, dated 1930, appears near Nan Goldin’s 1978 self-portrait as a dominatrix and an 1860 daguerreotype of two girls holding an image of their deceased mother.

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Eadweard Muybridge and Diane Arbus—two very different artists whose work contains seemingly inexhaustible achievements—are among the photographers who make repeat appearances throughout The Plot Thickens. Other artists included are: Mel Bochner, Katy Grannan, Alfred Stieglitz, Kota Ezawa, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, the Louisville optician who left behind an unforgettable body of work at his death in 1972, at the age of 46.

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Fraenkel Gallery opened in San Francisco in September 1979 with an exhibition of recently discovered albumen prints by the nineteenth-century photographer Carleton Watkins. Since then, the gallery has presented more than 300 exhibitions exploring photography and its connections to the other arts, and published 55 books on subjects ranging from Edward Hopper’s influence on photography to the sculptor David Smith’s multi-decade involvement with photographs, as well as the complete library of Diane Arbus and nine monographs by Lee Friedlander.

The post The Plot Thickens appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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More than a century of attempts to depict, through photographs, a reality beyond appearances is testament to a stubborn conviction that what can be seen is not all there is. In the book’s introduction Jeffrey Fraenkel writes, “From the moment of its invention almost 175 years ago, photography has proven adept at depicting the photographable: the solid, the concrete, that which can be seen. […] But another tradition exists, a parallel history in which photographers and other artists have attempted to describe by photographic means that which is not so readily seen: thought, time, ghosts, god, dreams. A vast array of strategies has been employed to bring such pictures about, tactics that have intersected and enriched the strains of modern art.”

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The exhibition will be installed in all three of the gallery’s spaces. Visitors will encounter Jakob Ottonowitsch’s Spark captured on the surface of the body of a well-washed prostitute, Tom Friedman’s Caveman, T. Glendenning Hamilton’s portrait of The T’zan Teleplasm, and Bruce Conner’s ethereal depiction of an angel. Among other works included are Wolfgang Tillmans’s Mental Picture from 2001, Frederick Sommer’s portrait of Max Ernst as a vanishing spirit, and Gerhard Richter’s attempt to depict the incomprehensibility of 9/11, titled simply September.

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Artists participating in the exhibition include Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, F. Baldet & F. Quénisset, Walead Beshty, Mel Bochner, Sophie Calle, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Liz Deschenes, Kota Ezawa, Tom Friedman, Adam Fuss, Paul Graham, Idris Khan, Clarence John Laughlin, Richard Learoyd, Glenn Ligon, Adrien Majewski, Man Ray, Christian Marclay, Chris McCaw, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Richard Misrach, Jakob Ottonowitsch von Narkiewitsch-Jodko, Gerhard Richter, Frederick Sommer, Alfred Stieglitz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

The post The Unphotographable appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Mel Bochner is considered a pioneer of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Best known for his paintings, drawings and installations, in the mid to late 1960s Bochner became deeply involved with photography. This exhibition focuses on Bochner’s ground-breaking photographs from that time period, and shows how those formed much of the basis for Bochner’s work up to the present. Bochner was fully involved in the selection for this project, which in addition to photographs includes Smudge, a wall drawing of blue powder pigment from 1968, the 1970 set of Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), and several paintings, include NO, dating from this year.

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Bochner also collaborated closely on the exhibition catalog, the cover of which is made of plexiglas. The catalog includes an essay by Jeffrey Weiss, recently appointed curator of the Panza collection at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, tracing Bochner’s evolution from the 1960s to the present.

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