The title of the exhibition is inspired by Mishka Henner’s 2015 video I’m Not the Only One, in which Henner digitally combines 18 videos sourced from YouTube. Henner combined individual videos of people, alone in their bedrooms and makeshift studios, performing Sam Smith’s hit song of the same title. Stitched together, these solo performances transform the song’s lonely angst into a powerful yet immaterial chorus of solidarity and connection. Ironically, the current Covid-19 climate has treated us to a myriad of similar choirs from around the world, intentionally singing alone together.

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Katy GrannanSchatzi, Gerlach, Nevada

2018

pigment print, 29 x 39 inches (image, sheet & mount) [73.7 x 99.1 cm]

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In the second gallery, Nan Goldin’s French Chris on the convertible, NYC, 1979, presents a figure lost in his own swoon, suggesting an ecstatic kind of solitude. Also on view are images that alternately highlight the physical and emotional space between subjects. In Richard Misrach’s Boy Scouts, Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, Nevada, 1991, children stand in waist-deep water, dispersed in an arrangement that suggests the complexity of adolescent friendships. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s interactive piece was inspired by a time when the couple was apart, and often talked by phone. In it, a vintage telephone has been installed in the gallery. Picking up the receiver, a woman’s voice recounts her disjointed dream.

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Christian MarclayTelephones

1995

single-channel video with sound, 7 minutes, 30 seconds

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Christian Marclay’s seminal 1995 video Telephones is the gravitational force in the final room of the exhibition. This skillfully edited arrangement of clips from movies shows people using telephones the way they were originally intended to be used: dialing, ringing, greeting, and listening. The carefully sequenced fragments coalesce into a conversation between speakers who never seem to connect. In the same room, Johnnie Chatman’s series I Forgot Where We Were… depicts the artist alone in the grand vistas of the West. Set in the romantic and expansive American landscape, Chatman’s silhouette presents a stark image of individuality and isolation.

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There is a Portuguese word, saudade [pron:saa·deidz], that does not exist in English. More nuanced than melancholy or bittersweet, saudade is a subtle yet enduring desire for something other than the present. Deep inside this word is the sense that the thing for which one longs may never be had again, while acknowledging that longing for the past would detract from the anticipation for the future. Saudade is likely what most of us are feeling right about now.

-Frish Brandt

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Alec SothFacebook, Menlo Park, California

2013

pigment print, 44 x 57 inches (framed) [112 x 145 cm]

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Katy GrannanAlexa

2018

pigment print, 58-1/4 x 44-1/4 inches (framed) [148 x 112.4 cm]

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Hiroshi SugimotoMK2 Biblothéque, Paris

2005

gelatin silver print, 18-7/8 x 22-3/4 inches (sheet) [47.9 x 57.8 cm]

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Diane ArbusLady in a Roominghouse Parlor, Albion, N.Y.

1963

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

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Alec SothWilliam Eggleston, Memphis, TN, 2000

2018

chromogenic print, 33 x 41 inches (framed) [83.8 x 104.1 cm]

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Richard LearoydFemale nude with mirror

2016

unique Ilfochrome photograph, 80-3/8 x 59-7/8 inches (framed) [204.2 x 152.1 cm]

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Alec SothPark Hyatt Hotel, Tokyo (Mirror)

2015

pigment print, 42 x 32 (framed) [107 x 82 cm]

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Diane ArbusKiss from “Baby Doll,” N.Y.C. 1956

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

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Lee FriedlanderGalax, Virginia

1962

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

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Lee FriedlanderNew York City, 1963

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

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Johnnie ChatmanSelf Portrait, John Ford Point, 2018

2019

pigment print, 37 x 53 inches (framed) [94 x 135 cm]

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Sophie CallePatrick X, Sixteenth Sleeper

1979

8 gelatin silver prints & 1 text panel, 19 x 24-3/4 inches (overall, approximately) [48.3 x 62.9 cm]

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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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Peter HujarDavid Wojnarowicz

1981 / printed later

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

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Wardell MilanEdward

2019

cut and pasted printed paper, 14-3/4 x 12-3/4 inches (framed) [37.5 x 32.4 cm]

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Nan GoldinFrench Chris on the convertible, NYC

1979

pigment print, 31-3/4 x 46-7/8 inches (framed) [80.7 x 119.1 cm]

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Ralph Eugene MeatyardUntitled

1963

gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches (sheet) [20.3 x 25.4 cm]

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Janet Cardiff & George Bures MillerI Can’t Remember (World Turning)

2010

telephone, solid state playback device, 6 x 8 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches [15.24 x 22.23 x 13.97 cm]

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Richard MisrachBoy Scouts and Fremont’s Pyramid, Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, Nevada

1991

pigment print, 61 x 77 inches (framed) [155 x 195.6 cm]

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“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweet as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”

—Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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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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Richard MisrachCrying Woman (for K.A.C.), Bombay Beach, California

2011

pigment print, 10-5/8 x 14-1/4 inches (sheet) [45.1 x 59.1 cm]

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Peter HujarHorse in Harness (I)

1969

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

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Earache, an exhibition of photographs largely but not exclusively drawn from Fraenkel Gallery inventory, began with an invitation to look around. A Peter Hujar portrait of the late John Ashbery was an early anchor, and it was through the poet that I found “earache,” a two-syllable lens through which countless images were surveyed over these last months. While many of Ashbery’s concerns map onto those of photography—exposure and opacity, surface and depth, nostalgia and immediacy—it is the poet’s associative rather than thematic approach that most resonates with regards to constructing this exhibition.

A photographer friend suggested the title be dropped once it lost its utility, but the truth is, it never did. Instead, it became a model symptom of a larger, harder-to-name condition. The poem from which it’s taken, however, did give way to a passage from Tara Jepsen’s remarkable 2017 novel, Like a Dog. In addition to skateboarding, the book has a lot to do with risk, loss, trust, and stability. We printed and posted the extended quotation on the wall, like an image.

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Robert AdamsAn inexpensive prosthetic foot, made for the victims of land mines

ca. 1995

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

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The human balance system provided helpful metaphoric scaffolding, especially the discovery that a small tube in the middle ear maintains equilibrium by matching interior and exterior air pressure. What is the pressure of these pictures under glass, the pressure of the room, the pressure in our bodies, the pressure to sell? Arriving at a single diagnosis for balance dysfunction is cumbersome due to the interconnection of our senses; the same infection that causes an earache, for example, might also bring about persistent vertigo, blurred vision, or cognitive fatigue. In other words, the tools that determine our position in space are capable of sending us across the physical and emotional deck. This exhibition is about that deck, and the notion that perception is an active process of constructing reality.

The tenor of the times affected the checklist, in many cases represented literally as the writing on the wall. The torrential bad-news cycle and its attendant anxieties inspired the more discomfiting and surreal elements and the exhibition begins and returns to a number of narrators, all of them unreliable. Take Atget’s stone faun. Once thought to inspire fear in travelers far from home, fauns were also capable of guiding those in need. Which is it? Pictures are by definition without narrative, and with no narrative comes no expectations. That said, I was surprised that the tone grew more sentimental and melancholic over time— animals and flowers accumulated, as pillows or markers.

I hope Earache carries like a sentence, with varied punctuation, spacing, abstraction, and intent, and that the intuition and free association at the helm of this process is visible.

—Jordan Stein

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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.

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From the catalogue’s introduction by Jeffrey Fraenkel:

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Among the most remarkable photographs to be included in Furthermore is Morton Schamberg’s 1918 Dada masterpiece, “God.” Believed to be the only print in existence, “God” is a study of a cast iron plumbing fixture mounted to a wooden base. Regarded as a sister piece to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “Fountain” (a readymade of an upended urinal) from the same year, there is uncertainty about who first conceived of transforming plumbing into art. Schamberg died suddenly during the 1918 Philadelphia influenza epidemic, age 38.

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This is the eighteenth installation of the exhibition known for its eclectic group of artists, some familiar and others unknown.  The exhibition provides an opportunity to study a provocative range of photographs that encompasses both flea market finds and historic treasures.

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Included in this year’s selection is an ethereal Carleton Watkins mammoth-plate view of the Mendocino coastline circa 1863, as well as a group of Loewy and Puiseux heliogravures of the moon made at the end of the nineteenth century.  These pictures come from The Photographic Atlas of the Moon, considered the astronomers’ greatest achievement.  Helen Levitt, typically known for her black and white street scenes, is represented by her later, color pictures, recently published in the book Slide Show.  Four of Peter Hujar’s black and white portraits will be included as well as an early diptych from the German artists Bernd & Hilla Becher.  Another highlight is a group of Mechanical Forms, a pristine study of form and structure by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Six pictures from Diane Arbus’s radical Untitled series will be on view.  The portraits made during 1970 and 1971, at a residence for the mentally handicapped in New Jersey, represent a courageous body of work made during the last year of the artist’s life.

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This is the seventeenth installation of the exhibition known for its eclectic group of artists, some familiar and others unknown.  This exhibition provides the gallery with an opportunity to present a lively showing of recently acquired photographs that span a range inclusive of both flea market finds and historic treasures.

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Among this year’s highlights is Eugene Atget’s surrealist Fête du Trône, made in 1926, the year before his death.  This print’s history includes possession by Tristan Tzara, the poet and essayist best known as a founder of Dada.  Lee Friedlander, whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, will be represented in a group of early and recent pictures.  Also on view will be several little-known imperial plate photographs by Carleton Watkins, made in California and Oregon circa 1880; an extraordinary study of clouds over Santa Monica by Edward Weston, from 1936; a curious selection of anonymous photographs from both the 19th and 20th centuries and two new portraits by Katy Grannan, one of the most noted artists in last year’s Whitney Biennial.  Other works from Grannan’s series Mystic Lake will be exhibited at Fraenkel Gallery this coming January.

Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XVII can be seen concurrently with the exhibition, JOHN GUTMANN at 100.

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This year’s highlights include new work by Adam Fuss, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Irving Penn, Catherine Wagner, William Wegman and Henry Wessel; rare and classic images such as Joel-Peter Witkin’s Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris, Robert Frank’s 1950s print of teenagers waiting in line outside of a television studio in Hollywood, a vintage print of Paul Outerbridge’s 1923 image Ethiopian Form and Ken Moody with his Eyes Closed by Robert Mapplethorpe; unlikely surprises such as Felice Beato’s Review of Fire Brigades (1860), Edouart & Cobb’s San Francisco Fusiliers, San Francisco (1878), Helen Levitt’s portrait of Walker Evans with a drape on his head and Diane Arbus’ Woman with a Floppy Hat. Some of the quirkiest images are by anonymous photographers such as a large-scale hand-colored family portrait from the 19th century and a picture of two tiny ants in the snow.

Also exhibited will be work of Diane Arbus, E.J. Bellocq, Christopher Bucklow, Harry Callahan, Sophie Calle, Gary Fabian-Miller, Nan Goldin, Lewis Hine, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Nadar, Eadweard Muybridge, August Sander, Charles Sheeler, David Smith, Alfred Steiglitz, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Garry Winogrand.

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Unquestionably one of the master photographers of the urban 1930s, Levitt thrived amongst the imaginative realm of children. With a hand-held camera, often fitted with a right-angle viewfinder which allowed her to capture her subjects unaware and unguarded, Levitt documented the theater of daily life on the streets of New York. Lesser known yet of equal originality are her ambitions and experimental studies of graffiti. The current exhibition is the first solely devoted to this aspect of Levitt’s work.

Timeless in certain respects, Levitt’s perspective on the fugitive missives of young correspondents portrays both the universal time of childhood, and the geologic time of Lower Manhattan in the 1930s and 40s. Levitt, in her uniquely transparent and self-effacing method, documents the ingenuity and creativeness of children forever tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell: “I am a killer” scratched across wood planks; “A Detective Lives Here” divulged across cement steps; a caricature of a person thinking hieroglyphically: “5¢ for an ice cream soda.”

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Levitt is a recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. her work has been exhibited internationally, including most recently as a traveling retrospective co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Monographs of her work include A Way of Seeing (Duke University Press) now in its fourth printing and In the Street (Duke University Press).

This exhibition is concurrent with Lee Friedlander: Letters from the People.

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