The Estate of Peter Hujar is jointly represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and Pace Gallery in New York, together with Mai 36 Galerie in Zürich and Maureen Paley in London.

The post Portraits in Life and Death appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Peter HujarThek Working on the Tomb Figure

1967

pigment print by Gary Schneider, 16 x 20 inches (sheet) [40.6 x 50.8 cm], edition of 10

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Jeffrey Fraenkel: I would say this project felt fully born from the moment Jordan first proposed it. We both knew the exhibition would be wide ranging and would encompass work in a variety of media. And of course there were two scientists working on this project instead of the single Dr. Frankenstein in the book – the perfect vehicle to meld our sensibilities. 

Jordan Stein: And to echo the nature of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, it was intuitive to assemble the show from disparate and available parts. The doctor is single-minded in his quest, and it’s clear that he will find a way to animate life. We knew it would come alive. There were certain images and artists that we sent back and forth, and it eventually reached a kind of perfectly manic equilibrium.

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Diane Arbus“Frankenstein’s Daughter” [close up with shoulders] 1958

gelatin silver print / printed by Diane Arbus, 11 x 14 inches (sheet) [27.9 x 35.6 cm]

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JF: My early tagline for the exhibition was “art that’ll scare the shit out of you,” but that evolved over time. Now fear is only one aspect of the show.

The first image I sent you was a Diane Arbus photograph made inside a movie theater in 1958. The theater was screening Frankenstein’s Daughter, and Arbus is, I think, recognizing the film’s tawdry scariness that is not really scary. Well, maybe it’s a little scary, but she pokes a hole through that with the photograph.

JS: The scariest stuff in our culture becomes a Halloween costume; Frankenstein is popular on October 31st in every neighborhood in this country. Danny McDonald’s piece, which includes more than a dozen different Frankenstein dolls and action figures, is called The Viewing; the largest one is dead and all the other Frankensteins are mourning its loss. Frankenstein is dead! Long live Frankenstein! There’s something funny and inexhaustible about Mary Shelley’s creation. Arbus certainly picked up on that.

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Danny McDonaldThe Viewing

2022

Fraenkenstein action figures (plastic, cloth, paint), pedestal, 52-1/4 x 33 x 18-1/2 (overall) [132.7 x 83.8 x 47 cm]

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JF: I had forgotten how meta the novel is. It is a story within a story, which is all the more astonishing when you realize Mary Shelley was only 19 when she wrote Frankenstein. The diversity of works selected for the show really do address a wide range of the book’s themes.

JS: Right. And it makes good sense to host the show at Fraenkel as the novel was written right alongside the invention of photography – they emerged just a few years apart. The fact that Dr. Frankenstein sets out to understand the otherwise invisible laws of nature is of a piece with the origins of photographic technology.

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Bruce ConnerTHE LATE NIGHT MOVIE ON TV: JUNE 10, 1978 @1:20-1:27 A.M.: STERNS MOTEL IN VENICE, CA, NEG.#10A

1978

gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches (sheet) [27.9 x 35.6 cm], edition of 3

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Bruce ConnerTHE LATE NIGHT MOVIE ON TV: JUNE 10, 1978 @1:20-1:27 A.M.: STERNS MOTEL IN VENICE, CA, NEG.#11A

1978

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [35.6 x 27.9 cm], edition of 3

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JF: For me, maybe the central piece in the show is John Waters’s altered portrait of Lassie after cosmetic surgery, to make her appear younger. I mean, it’s hard for an old broad of a collie to get work in Hollywood these days, right? John’s piece strikes me as the ultimate Hollywood horror story about the fear of aging, told in the darkly comic voice that’s uniquely his.

JS: The Hiroshi Sugimoto is a perfect fit because the doctor talks about how his studies of electricity led to the creation of his monster. And the monster, of course, has a mind of its own – there it is looking back at you in these amazing Bruce Conner pictures. You know, you’re just trying to watch a little TV before nodding off, and BOOM – it’s got eyes on you. Similarly in Richard Misrach’s image of the shot-up Andy Warhol ad, there’s the Terminator-esque intersection of the human and the post-human. All in the name of hair spray!

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Hiroshi SugimotoLightning Fields 222

2009

gelatin silver print, 71-3/4 x 60 inches (framed) [182.3 x 152.4 cm], edition of 5

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Richard MisrachPlayboy #038 (Andy Warhol)

1990

pigment print, 29 x 25 inches (framed) [73.7 x 63.5 cm]

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JF: The Misrach is an unexpected image from a body of work made almost 35 years ago. It’s a straightforward photograph of a copy of Playboy magazine Richard found in the desert, a copy that had been used for target practice. As Richard looked through the magazine, he was horrified by the meanings that had been created by the bullet holes. The shot-through Playboy had become a new type of Duchampian found object.

JS: An art studio is in some ways like a laboratory, and there’s a relationship between artistic production and the activation of inanimate materials. In the Peter Hujar and Whitney Hubbs works, an art studio is clearly a place where unpredictable experiments are sanctioned and protected. In both works, the artist becomes the subject–similarly with Martine Gutierrez’s work. It’s hard to tell where the artist and subject stop and start, and it addresses the extraordinary alchemy that can happen in the studio and in an artist’s imagination.

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Whitney HubbsFunny Ha Ha #4

2022

chromogenic prints & archival clear tape on glass mirror, 36 x 60 inches (overall) [91.4 x 152.4 cm]

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Martine GutierrezPlastics, Brigitte

2020

chromogenic print, 24 × 17 inches (framed) [61 × 43.2 cm], edition of 8

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JS: Dr. Frankenstein retreats from his family and from the broader world in an effort to make sense of his secret passion. I know a lot of artists like that. The doctor’s beating a path to do things that have never been done and to materialize visions that have never been seen. BJ Newton was a California artist who was in and out of correctional facilities, painting unearthly visions he conjured from the confines of a prison cell. There’s a play between portraiture, self-portraiture, landscape, and religious iconography that explores a world that is both here and beyond.

JF: Newton’s painting in the show seems end-of-the worldish, fiery, apocalyptic.

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B.J. NewtonOne Sow, One Reap

1969

oil on canvas, 21-1/4 x 34 inches (framed) [53.97 x 86.36 cm]

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JS: The doctor sets out to animate life, but some bits of human creation are too micro for him to construct. So he makes an oversized version of a person: it’s like the opposite of making a model. It gets bigger, like the kind of enormous animal foot in Brett Goodroad’s painting The Club.

JF: In the Goodroad, the very way it’s painted feels like a roiling of all the energies coming together in Dr. Frankenstein’s studio. If they could be depicted, they would look like this.

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Brett GoodroadThe Club

2015

watercolor on paper stretched over canvas, 24-1-2 x 35-1/2 inches [62.2 x 90.2 cm]

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JS: There are serious warnings in this book. I wrote down artificial intelligence a dozen times as I was reading this thing.

JF: Yeah. It feels as if Mary Shelley directly anticipated the potential consequences of artificial intelligence. What we created may soon be out to destroy us.

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures MillerGenie

2023

mixed media with electronics, magnet, 11 x 10 x 5 inches (overall) [27.9 x 25.4 x 12.7 cm]

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JS: It’s pretty uncanny. The monster finds a stack of books outside his hovel, and he begins to understand the complexity of the world by reading them. He’s learning through the construction of a data set.

JF: In a way, Christian Marclay’s works feel as if they are screaming with a warning to wake up, pay attention and save ourselves before it’s too late. Christian’s works were all made during the shutdown and convey that existential undercurrent of anxiety we felt then and continue to feel now.

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Christian MarclayUntitled (Cut Throat)

2020

comic book and magazine cutouts on paper, 19 x 18-1/2 inches (framed) [48.3 x 47 cm]

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JS: There’s an annotated version of Frankenstein for engineers and scientists published by MIT, but there’s no annotated Frankenstein for artists. It’d be my hope that maybe this exhibition kicks up some ideas around just how powerful and compelling artists’ visions have been, and will continue to be.

JF: One thing is for sure, if Mary Shelley came to see this show, she would love it.

JS: Mm-Hmm. It might even scare the shit out of her.

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Kota EzawaThe Scream

2016

transparency in lightbox, 33-3/4 X 26-3/4 inches (overall) [83.8 x 67.9 cm], edition of 5

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The post Fraenkenstein appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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John WatersReconstructed Lassie

2012

chromogenic print, 30 x 20 inches (image) [76.2 x 50.8 cm], edition of 5

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The monster we’ve come to know as Frankenstein was a vegetarian. He is also nameless, though his creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, refers to him as “being,” “fiend,” and “daemon.” Over the course of two centuries—the book was first published anonymously in 1818—and in the public imagination, the patient has taken the doctor’s name, and the word “Frankenstein” has been fashioned into a noun, verb, and adjective to signal a uniquely grotesque form of cobbled-togetherness.

The book—its story, subjects, and all around “It’s Alive!” flavor (a line taken from the 1931 Boris Karloff film, not the book)—is often read as a parable about the dangers of unchecked ambition, invention, and so-called progress, and its warning has been applied to the atomic age, climate change, the any-day-now takeover of artificial intelligence, and much more. It’s also a story about fear—a fear of the unknown, and a fear of the real and perceived monsters among and within us. In 2024, the book and its themes remain freakishly relevant, legible through countless lenses and applicable to enumerable blood-curdling prospects.

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Danny McDonaldThe Viewing

2022

Fraenkenstein action figures (plastic, cloth, paint), pedestal, 52-1/4 x 33 x 18-1/2 (overall) [132.7 x 83.8 x 47 cm]

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A proper exhibition tackling the book and the ways in which “Frankenstein” moves through popular culture would require a museum with the staff and resources of the Louvre. This project should therefore be considered entirely improper and radically incomplete, populated by artworks that speak in varied ways to the book’s varied concerns. The initial concept for Fraenkenstein was proposed by Stein to Fraenkel in the spring of 2023. Fraenkel said yes on the spot, and Fraenkenstein is the malfunctioning birthchild of their curiously overlapping sensibilities.

The exhibition features works by Diane Arbus, Hans Bellmer, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Bruce Conner, Kota Ezawa, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Brett Goodroad, Katy Grannan, Martine Gutierrez, Whitney Hubbs, Peter Hujar, George Kuchar, Justine Kurland, Christian Marclay, Danny McDonald, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Wardell Milan, Richard Misrach, BJ Newton, B. Ingrid Olson, Woody De Othello, Hiroshi Sugimoto, John Waters, Lindsey White, and others.

The post Fraenkenstein appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Richard MisrachNancy Holt, Sun Tunnels #26

1988

pigment print, 61 x 76-3/4 inches (framed) [151.1 x 190.5 cm], edition of 3

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Richard Misrach’s series Desert Canto XL – Art in the West examines the way artists work in the American desert. His subjects included Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, the 1973-1976 Land Art project she created in Utah’s Great Basin. Misrach’s photographs of the piece were featured in Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, a book pairing Misrach’s photographs from the site with material from Holt’s archive, including photo studies and a self-interview. ⁠

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Robert AdamsColorado Springs, Colorado

1968-71

gelatin silver print, 13 x 11 inches (mount) [33 x 27.9 cm]

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Roberts Adams’s​ view of a Colorado Springs gas station ​compares the glow of the evening sky with the electric light illuminating the gas pump. In the recent monograph American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams, Sarah Greenough ​writes about such juxtapositions​ in Adams’s work. 

“​Drawing on insights Hopper had given him into the ‘poignancy of light,’ [Adams] also began to savor the cool light of dusk​… Probing the liaison between the natural and the artificial, he explored the contrast between this evocative, tender light of dusk with its fleeting radiance and the harsh but still haunting glow of neon signs and streetlights that punctuated the darkness for hours on end​,”​ Greenough​ notes.

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Hiroshi SugimotoBrush Impression 0883 (Fire)

2023

gelatin silver print, 48-3/8 x 41 inches (framed) [122.9 x 104.1 cm], unique

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To create the one-of-a-kind calligraphic photographs in his Brush Impression series, Hiroshi Sugimoto paints Japanese characters onto light sensitive paper using photographic chemicals. Each unique piece records the movement of his brush across the surface of the paper, producing gestural shapes as well as splashes, bubbles, and traces of bristles. The kanji characters he selects often represent words for elemental forces—here he paints the character for fire. The meaning of each word is heightened and reinforced by the expressive qualities of each piece.

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Diane Arbus42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C. 1958

gelatin silver print / printed by Diane Arbus, 11 x 13-3/4 inches (mount) [27.9 x 34.9 cm]

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As a lifelong moviegoer, Diane Arbus was attuned to the divergent ways a viewer responded to a photograph and a film. By turning her camera to the spectators of New York’s movie houses, marquee movie posters, and screened dramas, Arbus captured moments where people were able to escape reality, engaging with the grander fantasies presented to them on screen.

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Elisheva BiernoffBeyond Our

2023

three acrylic paintings on wood, one painted both sides; pine frame, pushpins, 63-1/4 x 46-1/4 x 4-1/2 inches (overall) [160.7 x 117.5 x 11.4 cm]

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Elisheva Biernoff’s meticulously painted reproductions of found photographs are often small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. In Beyond Our, her recreation expands to encompass a photograph and a larger poster, as well as the wood-paneled wall on which they are displayed, all rendered in highly detailed acrylic. Together, the objects suggest questions about the mysteries that lie beyond the frame.

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Sophie CallePortrait de Marie-Thérèse

2022

pigment print, 57-1/2 x 57-1/2 inches (framed) [146 x 146 cm], edition of 2

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Sophie CalleBaigneuse ouvrant une cabine

2022

pigment print, 47-1/4 x 38-1/4 inches (framed) [120 x 97.2 cm], edition of 2

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Sophie CallePortrait de Jacques Prévert

2022

pigment print, 38-3/4 x 26-1/4 inches (framed) [98.4 x 66.7 cm], edition of 2

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As part of a 2023 exhibition at the Musée National Picasso-Paris commemorating the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, Sophie Calle presented photographs of Picasso’s paintings kept covered by paper and linens during lockdown. Shown in tandem with Calle’s own work and possessions, which filled three floors of the museum, her photographs reckon with Picasso’s legacy and memory.

In The Simpson Verdict, Kota Ezawa animates original footage of the legal proceedings of the O.J. Simpson trial, reconstructing frames of the video to recreate the subtle motions and gestures of the participants. By simplifying the images, Ezawa forces the viewer to look more closely at nuances of expression and the issues of race and celebrity that the case evoked.

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Hiroshi SugimotoBay of Sagami, Enoura

2022

gelatin silver print, 60 x 71-3/4 inches (framed) [152.4 x 182.2 cm], edition of 5

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For decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has photographed bodies of water around the world, creating the breathtaking Seascapes series. Bay of Sagami, Enoura is the first seascape made at Enoura Observatory, the headquarters of the Odawara Art Foundation, the organization founded by the artist. “Every time I view the sea,” Sugimoto writes, “I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.”

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Peter HujarRobert Bending (I)

1977

gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm]

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Peter Hujar often photographed his friends and fellow artists, emphasizing physicality and creating striking images of the body. These pictures encapsulated the relationships, music, and art that came to define the 1970s avant-garde scene in New York—as Hujar put it, he “liked people who dare.” Robert Levithan, a writer and one of Hujar’s lovers, was the subject of a series of nudes taken in the artist’s loft apartment turned studio.

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Wardell MilanNoelle lying in liberation

2022

silver leaf, acrylic, charcoal, graphite, china marker and color pencil on panel, 25-1/4 x 37-1/4 inches (framed) [64.1 x 94.6 cm]

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Wardell Milan has often depicted figures, especially marginalized bodies, in safe spaces—a distinction he sometimes conveys with color. “I try to embody love using color,” Milan noted recently. Often, the color he turns to is blue. “The many different tones of this color have come to represent affirmation, love, resilience and advocacy.” Using it, “I’m signaling to the viewer that this person or group of people, are to be championed, validated, and loved.”

Christian Marclay’s single-channel video incorporates thousands of images taken during his daily walks through London, animating them into a frenetic, flickering sequence​. The piece recalls flip-books, early cinema, and animation devices of the late nineteenth century, such as the zoetrope used by Eadweard Muybridge.

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Richard MisrachDiving Board, Salton Sea

1983

pigment print, 60-3/4 x 75-3/4 inches (framed) [154.3 x 192.4 cm], edition of 10

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An image from Desert Canto III: The Flood, one of the chapters from Richard Misrach’s long-running series focused on the American Southwest. The Flood depicts the Salton Sea, an artificial desert lake created in the 1900s, which grew into resort destination starting in the 1950s. Suffering from rising salinity and contamination from runoff, the lake became toxic, and by the 1980s many of the communities along its edges had been largely abandoned, leaving behind a surreal landscape.

The post Art Basel appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Carrie Mae WeemsThe North Star

2022

seven archival pigment prints framed with convex glass, 116-1/2 x 37 inches (overall installed) [295.9 x 93.9 cm]

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In Carrie Mae Weems’s The North Star, 2022, the artist explores a painful family story in which her grandfather, Frank Weems, a tenant farmer and union activist, disappeared after being attacked by a white mob in Earle, Arkansas, in 1936. Though he was presumed dead, he narrowly escaped and made his way to Chicago on foot by following the North Star, but was never able to reunite with his family. The work makes an apt metaphor for Frank Weems’s life and the longer history of the bright star, Polaris, which helped guide those escaping slavery. Extended across a long, horizontal plane, the photographs make up an alternative starry night sky, while highlighting the central image, around which the others extend like the branches of a family tree. 

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Hiroshi SugimotoEiffel Tower

1998

gelatin silver print, 71-3/4 x 60 inches (framed) [182.2 x 152.4 cm], edition of 5

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The Eiffel Tower remains an iconic element of Parisian architecture, visible even from within the walls of the Grand Palais Éphémère, where this year’s Paris Photo again takes place. In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic reinterpretation, the artist pictures the 1889 monument slightly out of focus and isolated from its urban context. Thus, the details of the iron framework fall away, leaving only the contours of its recognizable shape. The photograph becomes a testament to the timelessness of the tower and the ongoing aims of science, industry, and innovation. 

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Hiroshi SugimotoBrush Impression 0859 (Fire)

2023

gelatin silver print, 48-3/8 x 41 inches (framed) [122.9 x 104.1 cm], unique

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In Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Brush Impression, the artist draws upon his study of Japanese calligraphy to record the movement of his brush across the surface of the paper, producing gestural shapes as well as splashes, bubbles, and traces of bristles. Rather than using ink, however, Sugimoto paints with darkroom chemicals on gelatin silver paper to produce striking black and white compositions. Here, the fluidity of the brushstrokes mirrors the kanji character for the elemental expression of water.

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An 1880 photograph of a Siamese theater troupe pictures the stage from across the room, widening its view to encompass also the audience at far left. The slightly long exposure captures the movements of the central figures, along with their delicate gestures of touch, like a foot resting on another’s knee, and a hand pressing against a back.

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Wardell MilanThe Engineer

2022

graphite, oil paste, cut-and-pasted paper on yupo paper, 11-5/8 x 9-3/8 inches (framed) [29.53 x 23.8 cm]

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Wardell Milan’s character study, The Engineer, combines collaged photographs, colored pencil, graphite, and paint to construct an “exquisite corpse” of multiple body parts and their shifting perspectival views. A bit of an engineer himself, the artist playfully combines the pieces of his multi-media works to explore the duality between marginalization and the freedom of expression.

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Peter HujarChuck Gretsch (with Cigar)

1981

gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm]

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To compose this photograph of friend Chuck Gretsch, Peter Hujar stooped to his level, positioning his camera intimately close to the supine figure. Imbuing his photographs with the intimacy that so often determined his relationships with subjects, Hujar pairs the introspective gaze of his sitter with a column of curling smoke, rising ever so lightly from the cigar gripped between his lips.

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Diane ArbusChrist in a lobby, N.Y.C. 1964

gelatin silver print / printed by Neil Selkirk, 10-7/8 x 10 inches (sheet) [27.6 x 25.4 cm], edition of 75

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This curious photograph of an illuminated portrait of Christ in a New York lobby exhibits the kind of strange dualities that interested Diane Arbus throughout her career. The reflection of the portrait in the marbled surface of the adjoining wall not only duplicates the image in reverse, but projects a ghostly likeness of the holy figure, like the stained record that is the Veil of Veronica.

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Eadweard MuybridgeA: Ascending incline. B: Ascending incline with a 50-lb. dumbbell. C: Descending incline. D: Descending incline with a 50-lb. dumbbell

1887

collotype, 19 x 24 inches (sheet) [48.3 x 61 cm]

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From 1884 to 1887, Eadweard Muybridge amassed an impressive compendium of photographic studies on human and animal locomotion. Developed as tools for artists and scientists, Muybridge’s photographs documented anonymous figures, clothed or naked, in a variety of movements. Though the title does not suggest it, the figure pictured is Muybridge himself.

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Carleton E. WatkinsNevada Fall, 700 ft., Yosemite

1861

mammoth-plate albumen print, 32 x 36-1/2 inches (framed) [82 x 93 cm]

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From Carleton Watkins’s first Yosemite trip in 1861, this mammoth-plate photograph frames Nevada Falls within a long-exposure look at the Merced River below. This work is signed on the recto by the artist himself and was exhibited in the pivotal Watkins retrospective which took place at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is being offered for the first time.

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Hiroshi SugimotoPinon Juniper Forest

2012

gelatin silver print, 60 x 80-1/2 inches (framed) [152.4 x 204.5 cm], edition of 5

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The dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History—which transport viewers to far-flung corners of the globe at various moments in history—have long fascinated Hiroshi Sugimoto. During a 2012 visit to the museum, the artist positioned his camera at a particular vantage point before the artificial scene from where the viewer’s illusion of total immersion within the landscape could be achieved.

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Richard MisrachSubmerged Gas Pumps, Salton Sea

1983

pigment print, 60-3/4 x 75-3/4 inches (framed) [154.3 x 192.4 cm], edition of 10

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The third chapter of Richard Misrach’s series, Desert Cantos, “The Flood,” focuses on the Salton Sea of Southern California, a lake created by an engineering mistake at the beginning of the twentieth century. A popular tourist destination throughout the 1950s and 60s, excessive irrigation flooded the area further, leaving infrastructure like these gas pumps eerily submerged and the water at risk of contamination. The fraught history of the desert landscape, and its political turmoil, remains subtly coded within Misrach’s picturesque depiction.

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Robert AdamsShopping center. Wheat Ridge, Colorado

1968-71

gelatin silver print, 13 x 11 inches (mount) [33.0 x 27.9 cm]

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Apart from the expansive views of Colorado’s Front Range, Robert Adams’s photographic studies of the mid-century suburban expansion outside of Denver captured more intimate scenes of everyday life, like this parking lot outside the local grocery store. A line of cars obfuscates the natural horizon beyond, yet a resilient tree rises into frame alongside the shop signs reflecting America’s car-centric culture.

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Harry DutchyshynMPRTC 8801-1 TSU, Camp Gordon, Georgia, Company C

1953

gelatin silver print, 19-3/4 x 12 inches (sheet) [50.2 x 30.5 cm]

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American military photographer Harry Dutchyshyn emigrated in 1926 from Austria to the U.S., where he worked as the post photographer at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey before transferring to Camp Gordon in Georgia after the Second World War. Dutchyshyn’s 1953 portrait of the 229 soldiers of the camp’s Company C was taken weeks after the end of the Korean War, and just five years after President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the United States Military. The changing racial makeup of the armed services in the aftermath of an intense period of global conflict is reflected in the class portrait, which includes the last names and hometowns of the individuals pictured.

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Bernd & Hilla BecherGrain Elevator [Getreideheber], Buffalo, New York, U.S.A.

1982

gelatin silver print, 20-5/8 x 24 inches (sheet) [52.4 x 61 cm], edition of 5

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Grain elevators, which afforded agricultural production the privilege of industrial scale, were a longtime subject for Bernd and Hilla Becher. Approaching this example near Buffalo, New York, the husband and wife duo photographed their subject according to the “impersonal” and “uninflected” style consistent throughout their career. Yet the lettering adorning its surface, as well as the line of railroad tracks and surrounding buildings, imbue the site with a sense for its unique character.

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When Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray began his renowned series of photograms (i.e., Rayographs) shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1921, he layered atop photosensitive paper everyday objects such as thumbtacks, coils, combs, and more. Here, Kota Ezawa’s reinterpretation further symbolizes the rudimentary forms that have become canonical in the history of photography. Installed as a lightbox, Ezawa’s “remix” re-animates the dreamlike image hovering somewhere between abstraction and representation.

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Carrie Mae WeemsPyramids of Rome – Ancient Rome

2006

digital chromogenic print, 73-1/2 x 61-1/2 inches (framed) [186.7 x 156.2 cm], edition of 5

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In the 2006 series of self-portraits, Carrie Mae Weems situates herself within monumental landscapes and sweeping vistas in and around Rome. Dressed in a long black dress with her back turned toward the camera, Weems confronts iconic architectural sites dotting the city and, in turn, the structures of power they symbolize. As Weems states, “You are always aware that you are sort of a minion in relationship to this enormous edifice—the edifice of power.”

The post Paris Photo appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

Christopher Ethelbert Cheyne operated a photographic studio in Hampton, Virginia, starting in 1894. His subjects included local businesses and family portraits, and in 1909, he photographed the graduating men and women of the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically Black university founded in 1868. The Hampton Institute was the subject of a book published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, featuring Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photographs of the school and its students, commissioned for the Paris Centennial Exposition of 1900.

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Diane ArbusA Puerto Rican housewife, N.Y.C. 1963

gelatin silver print, titled and outlined by Diane Arbus in ink, 10 x 10-7/8 inches (sheet) [25.4 x 27.6 cm]

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This print, made by Arbus between 1963 and 1965, includes a hand-drawn border with the name of the subject inscribed below. The image was included in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967.

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Martine GutierrezHit Movie Poster

2022

chromogenic print, 43-1/2 x 73-1/4 inches (framed) [109.8 x 186.0 cm], edition of 5

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“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” according to the French New Wave film director Jean Luc Godard. Known for her complex critiques of popular culture and gender archetypes, the transdisciplinary artist Martine Gutierrez stages her own movie, assuming a diverse cast of femme fatales in Hit Movie. The photograph—a still from her video piece—alludes to the posters used to promote the 1990s action blockbuster films from which her heroines are drawn. Picturing herself as the Hollywood bombshells, she confronts the industry’s hyperfixation on feminine sexuality, revising Godard’s trope: “whether or not she is born with one, give a girl a gun and you’ve got a hit movie.”

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Lee FriedlanderMobile, Alabama

1966

gelatin silver print, 7 x 11 inches (sheet) [17.8 x 27.9 cm]

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In this self-portrait by Lee Friedlander, the artist’s shadow stands beneath a small sign noting the shop owner’s partial retirement—a sly image made early in Friedlander’s own career. Known for his playful layering of stylistic elements, Friedlander has often included his own shadow in photographs, inserting himself into the scene with mischievous humor.

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Robert AdamsSouth of Burns, Oregon

1999

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [35.6 x 27.9 cm]

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Robert AdamsUntitled

2020

ink on wood, 8-3/4 x 8-1/4 x 3/4 inches [22.2 x 20.9 x 1.9 cm]

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In 2020, Robert Adams began making painted woodblocks—simplified compositions that draw on the stillness and grandeur he remembers from his time spent on the Colorado prairie. Modest in size and painted in springlike hues with block-printing ink, the wooden works sometimes echo forms found in his photographs. Robert Adams: The Plains, from Memory, collects these works in a catalogue published recently by Steidl.

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Richard MisrachCargo Ship (January 14, 2022 6:51 am)

2022

pigment print, 63 x 82-1/4 inches (framed) [160 x 208.9 cm], edition of 5

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Bernd & Hilla BecherCooling Towers [Kühltürme] 1968-1999

2005

nine gelatin silver prints, 56-1/4 x 68-1/4 inches (installed) [142.9 x 173.4 cm]

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Bernd and Hilla Becher’s ambitious nine-part typology pictures a series of cooling towers with an eye toward precision, clarity, and consistency. Seen from the front, each photograph depicts the facade of a tower, with large turbine fans peeking out from the base. With their rigorous photographic practice, the Bechers composed complex typologies allowing for comparative analyses of the shifting industrial landscapes of Western Europe and North America.

Such a project was only possible through the Bechers’ passion and technique. Writing about the recent exhibition of the artists’ work at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blake Gopnik observes that “the preternatural level of detail on view, and its glorious range of grays and blacks, require negatives the size of a man’s hand, a tripod as big as a sapling, lens filters and an advanced darkroom technique.”

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Garry WinograndUntitled

1960

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [35.6 x 27.9 cm]

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Garry WinograndGreece

1978

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [35.6 x 27.9 cm]

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Peter HujarFran Lebowitz

1975

gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches (sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm]

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Fran Lebowitz was a close friend of Peter Hujar’s, and talks about their relationship in an interview published in Hujar’s monograph Love & Lust. “He was an insider,” says Lebowitz. “What connects all his photographs is that every single person he photographed, every single person that he was interested in, each of his friends, was a misfit. Peter was a misfit.” 

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Wardell MilanTwo warriors looking for euphoria

2018

charcoal, graphite, gesso, etching ink, cut-and-paste paper on ink jet print, 47-1/2 x 63-1/8 inches (framed) [120.7 x 160.3 cm]

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Wardell Milan works in mixed media, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. Themes of freedom and safety are often at the forefront of his works, especially as they apply to the marginalized body.

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Richard AvedonDick Hickock, murderer, Garden City, Kansas, April 15, 1960 and Walter Hickock, father of Dick Hickock, murderer, Garden City, Kansas, April 15, 1960

two gelatin silver prints, 20 x 16 inches (each sheet) [50.8 x 40.6 cm], edition of 13

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Richard Avedon photographed Dick Hickock and his father Walter at the request of Truman Capote, who was gathering material for In Cold Blood, his groundbreaking non-fiction novel about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. 

From Avedon, the younger Hickock, “gets the soft-focus celebrity treatment, the line between notoriety and fame as blurred as ever,” Alexandra Schwartz writes in The New Yorker. “Hickock, according to Capote, had always been self-conscious about his long, lopsided face. His nose juts out at a Picasso angle, and while his right eye meets Avedon’s lens straight on, his smaller left one seems to look inward. The result is a double portrait, part persona, part awkward, vulnerable self.”

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Richard LearoydSkate wing

2012

camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph, 46-7/8 x 46-7/8 inches (framed) [119.0 x 119.0 cm]

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The post Paris Photo appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Peter HujarEthyl Nude (I)

1979

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Throughout the 1970s and 80s, New York’s East Village was home to a flourishing culture of artistic experimentation and sexual liberation. With daring vulnerability, Hujar’s photographs captured a community of emerging artists, performers, and playwrights.

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Peter HujarRobert Wilson, Vestry Street (III)

1975

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Among the circles of Hujar’s friends were the renown theater director, Robert Wilson, the dancer and dramaturg, Sheryl Sutton, and the composer and pianist Philip Glass, who together staged the influential 1976 opera, Einstein on the Beach.

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Peter HujarEdgar Winter

1970

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Peter HujarBeauregard’s Dog Pilar

1983

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Peter HujarTrees with Flash, New Jersey

1975

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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The liberation of gay life in 1970s America sparked the vibrant sexual and artistic exploration visible in Hujar’s portraits of drag queens. Yet the landscapes he captured at night and in dilapidated locales still offered a feeling of loneliness, alienation, and quiet intimacy familiar to many marginalized queer persons. As the art critic Bob Nickas writes, “the night is a space in which to immerse oneself, or lose oneself, and for a gay man it is always to some degree a libidinal space.”

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Peter HujarCockette Link Martin

1971

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Drawing upon his short-lived career as a fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and GQ, Hujar pictured the San Francisco-based psychedelic drag troupe The Cockettes when they arrived in New York in November 1971 for a string of performances at the Anderson Theater. Commissioned by Steve Lawrence for the photographic periodical Newspaper, Hujar’s newsprint portraits were passed out by wheelbarrow during the performance’s intermission.

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Peter HujarNude from Behind

date unknown

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Many of Hujar’s most radical works combine the softness of his iconic portraits with the intimacy of eros and eroticism. Nude figures appeared before Hujar’s camera in varying states: in whole and in detail, young and old, covered in tattoos and caught in arousal.

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Peter HujarRuined Armchair (with Record), Newark

1985

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Throughout the 1980s, Hujar took spontaneous trips to New Jersey and upstate New York with friend and former lover David Wojnarowicz. In an abandoned building in Newark, they found a room littered with broken dishes, a ruined armchair, and garbage. Hujar’s flash illuminates every surface, filling the picture with pattern and texture.

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Peter HujarJackie Curtis in Coffin

1985

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Hujar lived and worked in an apartment on Second Avenue previously occupied by the underground performer and Warhol superstar, Jackie Curtis. Its large, white wall became the backdrop against which he photographed his wider network of friends, including the performer and playwright Ethyl Eichelberger. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Eichelberger starred in a series of East Village plays based on the lives of great women like “Medea,” “Lucrezia Borgia,” “Klytemnestra,” and “Auntie Belle Emme.”

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Peter HujarEthyl Eichelberger as Auntie Belle Emme

1979

gelatin silver print / printed by Peter Hujar, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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Peter HujarWill: Shar-Pei (I)

1985

pigment print / printed by Gary Schneider, 22-3/4 x 22-3/4 inches (framed) [57.8 x 57.8 cm]

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