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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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Robert Adams’s early, unpublished image of a Colorado commercial strip is from his seminal body of work, The New West, a photographic essay about our imprint on the landscape of the American West. Adams’s work is the subject of a current exhibition American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which explores the spiritual and environmental meanings of his work. The show is accompanied by a catalogue (available for purchase here).

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Bernd & Hilla BecherCooling Towers; Blast Furnaces; Water Towers; Winding Towers [Kühltürme; Hochöfen; Wassertürme; Fördertürme]

1973 – 1986

four typologies, each comprised of nine gelatin silver prints, 34-3/8 x 108-1/2 inches (overall) [87.3 x 275.6 cm]

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A collection of typologies by Bernd & Hilla Becher, assembled by a close friend of the artists, brings together four types of structures, subverting the viewer’s expectation of what is being typologized: the structures or the prints.

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Hiroshi SugimotoMathematical Model 004: Dini’s surface: A Surface of Constant Negative Curvature Obtained by Twisting A Pseudosphere

2006

aluminum, iron, 119 x 9 x 9 inches (overall) [302.3 x 22.9 x 22.9 cm]

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Hiroshi Sugimoto works in metal to produce mathematical models, following the tradition of forms envisioned by mathematicians to give substance to geometric ideas. “I have attempted to transform mathematical equations into tangible objects,” he has written about the works, which are created using a computer and advanced machining tools to sculpt each form. 

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Diane ArbusTattooed lady with dog, Philadelphia, Pa. 1964

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

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Diane Arbus signed and inscribed the verso of this print:

“Miss Betty Broadbent, tattooed lady with Goldie, Her dog. Phila. 1964.“

The image is included in the definitive monograph Diane Arbus: Revelations, to be reissued by Aperture in the fall of 2022.

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Carrie Mae WeemsPainting the Town #3

2021

pigment print, 58-7/8 x 86-7/8 inches (framed) [149.9 x 221 cm]

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Activism has been central to Carrie Mae Weems’s practice. In new, large-format photographs made in Portland, Oregon, Weems records the aftermath of the city’s 2020 protests for racial justice. In the series, boarded-up windows become a canvas, collecting traces of graffiti and the paint used to cover it.    

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Richard LearoydUntitled [Two parrots]

2022

Ilfochrome photograph, 63-3/4 x 54-5/8 inches (framed) [161.8 x 138.8 cm]

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Inspired in part by Paul Gauguin’s 1902 painting Still Life with Parrots, Richard Learoyd’s photograph captures the iridescent feathers and the talismanic form of the two birds. Learoyd describes the image as “a joyous celebration of the exotic mingled with the tragedy of mortality.”

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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 of expression and safe spaces are often at the forefront of his works, especially as they apply to the marginalized body.

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Peter HujarKeith Cameron (II)

1981

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

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“Lightly bearded, with tousled hair falling over one eye, he looks like a Greenpoint hipster,” Vince Aletti has written about one of Peter Hujar’s portraits of Keith Cameron.

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Richard MisrachTrain Tracks, Colorado Desert, California

1984 / printed 2022

pigment print, 63-1/2 x 82-7/8 inches (framed) [161.3 x 210.5 cm]

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Liz DeschenesBlue Wool Scale #1

2019

pigment print on aluminum, 34-1/4 x 24-1/4 inches (framed) [87 x 61.6 cm]

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​​Since the early 1990s, Liz Deschenes​ has made the medium of photography the subject of her work, exploring the meaning inherent in its materials. This work​ is from a series that references the Blue Wool Scale, a standard developed by textile manufacturers to measure lightfastness, and widely used in art conservation.

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Irving PennCigarette No. 037, New York

1972

platinum-palladium print mounted on aluminum, 32 x 26 inches (framed) [81.3 x 66 cm]

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Writing in 1975 about Irving Penn’s platinum-palladium prints of cigarettes, John Szarkowski noted, “The capricious and frankly inconsequential nature of the nominal subject matter, in conjunction with its ambitious and enormously sophisticated handling, constitute a clear statement of intention: these photographs can be considered only as works of art.”

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Martine GutierrezNeo-Indeo, Monochrome Mamacita, p28 from Indigenous Woman

2018

chromogenic print, 54-7/8 x 36-7/8 inches (framed) [139.4 x 93.7 cm]

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Working across mediums, Martine Gutierrez acts as an idiosyncratic cultural producer, blurring the lines between art and advertisement. In Neo-Indeo, a fashion editorial in the self-produced magazine Indigenous Woman, Gutierrez wears Indigenous textiles, some of which belonged to her Mayan grandparents, in a personal, multicultural version of high fashion.

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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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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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American Mystic includes a number of photographs in which Meatyard cast family members and friends in central roles, often masked and enacting symbolic dramas, such as Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3, 1962.

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Ralph Eugene MeatyardRomance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce # 3

1962

gelatin silver print, 13 x 10 inches (mount) [33.0 x 25.4 cm]

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Meatyard also experimented with multiple exposures, motion blur, distortion, and other methods of abstraction, as in the blurred landscapes of his “Motion-Sound” images. In addition, American Mystic will present a group of shimmering photographs of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, which were featured in the 1971 book The Unforeseen Wilderness, accompanied by text by his friend Wendell Berry.

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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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In the gallery’s accompanying publication Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic, Alexander Nemerov examines Meatyard’s creative process through a series of short texts paired with 48 of Meatyard’s photographs. The 100-page, fully illustrated hardcover book will be available at the gallery and at fraenkelgallery.com ($45). Fraenkel Gallery will host a reading and book signing with the author on Saturday, March 11, at 2pm.

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Alec SothRiverview Motel

2005

pigment print, 49-1/8 x 41-1/8 inches (framed) [124.8 x 104.5 cm]

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How I Learned to See is organized by six sections or “chapters” on the subjects of loneliness, love, aging, solitude, beauty, and discovery. Yanagihara has selected an idiosyncratic mix, with iconic and less familiar works by 12 artists: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Elisheva Biernoff, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Peter Hujar, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Alec Soth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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Robert AdamsColorado Springs, Colorado

1968

gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 inches (sheet) [36.5 x 27.9 cm]

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As a preface, the exhibition begins with an early work by Peter Hujar, Girl Throwing Ball, Southbury (I), 1957, which depicts a girl playing in a field at a state facility for adults with intellectual disabilities.

The first chapter, on loneliness, features The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961 by Diane Arbus; a photograph of a desolate motel at night by Alec Soth; Robert Adams’s picture of a solitary figure in a suburban home; a Nicholas Nixon photograph of an AIDS patient; and an affecting recent portrait by Katy Grannan.

The second section of How I Learned to See explores love, including couples by Arbus; erotic works by Nan Goldin; Elisheva Biernoff’s painting based on a found photograph; and two pictures from Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Lucybelle Crater series (1970-72), showing pairs posing contentedly in humorous and disfiguring masks.

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Nan GoldinClemens and Jens embracing in my hall, Paris

2001

Cibachrome print, 28-1/2 x 41 inches (framed) [72.4 x 104.1 cm]

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Chapter 3, on aging, begins with a photograph by Arbus of a former beauty, heavily made up while smoking in bed (Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966). Another highlight of this section is a group of eight works from Nixon’s series The Brown Sisters, for which he has photographed his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters annually over the course of 41 years.

The following section explores solitude through works by Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Arbus, as well as Adams’ celebrated photograph of an illuminated gas station at night (Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, 1969).

Beauty is the theme of the Chapter 5, for which the curator has selected two seldom seen portraits by Hujar from the late 1950s; Callahan’s iconic portrait of his wife in the water, with her eyes closed and hair floating on the surface (Eleanor, Chicago, 1949); and a luminous work by Goldin (Pawel on the beach laughing, Positano, 1996).

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Richard MisrachUntitled (Hawaii XV)

1978

pigment print, 56-1/2 x 69-1/2 inches (framed) [143.5 x 176.5 cm]

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The final chapter features work that suggests the position of an outsider coming upon an unfamiliar subject and milieu, including Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Mandrill, 1980, from his Diorama series; Soth’s photograph of a single light bulb hanging above a mysterious clearing in the trees; as well as a pair of pictures by Richard Misrach, shot in Hawaii at night, in which a harsh flash captures the odd tangle of vegetation against the shadowy background of a dense tropical forest.

The post How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures, Curated by Hanya Yanagihara 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.

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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.

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This exhibition is presented in association with DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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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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Ralph Eugene Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925.  He lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he worked as an optician at his shop Eyeglasses of Kentucky and photographed in his spare time.  Meatyard’s friendships with teachers and fellow photographers Van Deren Coke, Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind and Minor White encouraged him to push the limits of photography.  Working outside of the photographic mainstream, his imagery consisted largely of symbolic dramas, set in ordinary, often abandoned places and enacted mostly by his own family.

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From 1957 to 1972, Meatyard undertook several different conceptual projects exploring the possibilities of abstraction in photography.  The exhibition consists of approximately twenty-five photographs from these lesser-known series of the artist’s oeuvre.

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With his study of “Zen Twigs” Meatyard examined the mysterious forms of tree branches photographed close-up with a low depth of field.  The camera’s focus on the twig detail contrasts with the obscured shapes of the background.  In his “Light on Water” photographs, Meatyard experimented with luminescent, broken reflections in water.  The dramatic bursts of light created by the artist’s use of movement produced an effect similar to the free-form qualities of Abstract Expressionist painting.  The “No-Focus” photographs reduce groups of human figures to indistinct abstractions.  These organic shapes appear blurry and operate outside of the notion of a traditional, photographic portrait.  In each of their varying forms, the abstract series affirm the depth of Meatyard’s experimentation and creative vision that came to a premature end with his death from cancer in 1972.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Abstractions 1957-1972 can be seen concurrently with the exhibition Richard Misrach: Night Photographs 1975-1977.

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The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) defy convention. They have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Fascinated by the uncanniness of ordinary life, Meatyard made mysterious staged images using his friends and family—often involving masks and abandoned spaces—that are familiar and disturbing at the same time.

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From 1953 until his untimely death in 1972, Ralph Eugene Meatyard explored what he called the “photographic.” Shortly into his photographic life, Meatyard began experimenting with the technical and formal attributes of the camera. Using long exposures to record light reflecting off water, extreme focus for his “no-focus” images, and low depth of field for his “Zen twigs” series Meatyard defied traditional photographic means.  By 1960, he was regularly making photographs of his three children in abandoned rural Kentucky mansions and in the forests surrounding them. Highly imaginative, even surrealistic, the photographs evoke a world not normally acknowledged with the human eye. They suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood, intimacy, loss, and destruction. These images, which form the largest component of the exhibition, are what Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.”

Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and moved to Lexington in 1950, after serving in the U.S. Navy and studying at Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University. Meatyard spent most of his life in Lexington, where he worked as an optician at his shop Eyeglasses of Kentucky and photographed in his spare time. In 1956, summer workshops at Indiana University brought him in contact with such influential photographers as Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. These interactions, alongside his deep friendships with Thomas Merton, Guy Davenport and other thinkers and literati of Lexington, paved the way for Meatyard to launch his own photographic vision. Solo and group exhibitions soon followed across the country. His prodigious career ended in 1972 when he died of cancer.

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD is presented concurrently with the exhibition Obsessions of the Oculist.

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RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician. Working outside of the photographic mainstream, his imagery consisted largely of symbolic dramas, set in ordinary, often abandoned places and enacted mostly by his own family. Taken as a whole, his photographs seem to embody a belief that revelation does not depend on sight.

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The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater is Meatyard’s swan song and was produced primarily during the two years before his death of cancer in 1972. 

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The series consists of 64 portraits of “Lucybelle Crater”, a name adapted by Meatyard from a character in a Flannery O’Connor short story.  In each picture, “Lucybelle” is played by Meatyard’s wife Madelyn wearing a dime-store hag’s mask, paired with various family members and friends in a transparent second mask that had an aging effect on its wearers. The sequence and structure of the series is that of anyone’s family album, beginning with immediate family and extending out to other relations and finally to a larger circle of friends. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person need not be known to the viewer of this work, for he gave every character the same name — Lucybelle Crater.  In the final image of this series, made shortly before his death, Meatyard and his wife traded clothes and masks, having returned to the garden where the first photo had been realized.

The long out-of-print book of the “Lucybelle” photographs has had an enormous influence and near-legendary reputation since its posthumous publication in 1974.  This will be the first exhibition of the complete vintage set of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

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