Conversations | Fraenkel Gallery

The Singular Vision of Peter Hujar

Rebecca Robertson — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:06:52 +0000

In a 2025 interview in Frieze, Alastair Curtis talks with photographer and printer Gary Schneider about his relationship with Peter Hujar, whose work Schneider printed for more than thirty years. Schneider describes the beginning of his friendship with Hujar, and what he learned about Hujar’s darkroom philosophy. “To this day, I always follow his dictum, with his work and mine, that no two prints need to match: they all need to function,” recalls Schneider.

Read the interview here.

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Advice for Young Artists

Christa Palazzolo — Thu, 15 May 2025 19:22:41 +0000

Alec Soth talks with Fraenkel Gallery Director Christian Whitworth about his project Advice for Young Artists and the pursuit of a beginner’s experimental state of mind.

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The power of sound in Janet Cardiff’s “Forty Part Motet”

Rebecca Robertson — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 22:14:02 +0000

A 2025 video in the Museum of Modern Art’s series Art and the Senses looks at the role of sound in the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Focused on The Forty Part Motet (A reworking of “Spem in Alium,” by Thomas Tallis 1556) from 2001, the episode records the origins and development of the piece, and Cardiff and Bures Miller’s larger approach to making art.

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Under the Influence

Rebecca Robertson — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:55:29 +0000

Hiroshi Sugimoto is the subject of a 2025 episode of Under the Influence, a series of artist interview videos produced by Artforum. Sugimoto discusses his admiration for the music of Mozart, how a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition kick-started his career, and the observatory he’s building in Odawara, Japan.

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At Factum Arte

Rebecca Robertson — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:53:46 +0000

In a 2022 video produced for Madrid printmaking studio Factum Arte, Adam Fuss talks how he came to work in the studio, cut off from the outside world, and how he understands the job of the artist. “I do feel it’s my role as an artist and as a photographer to be able to challenge the trillions and trillions and trillions of images that I’ve seen, and to try and talk in image vocabulary, with new words or with novel syntax,” Fuss explains.

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Life in Seven Songs

Rebecca Robertson — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:28:33 +0000

Richard Misrach was featured as a guest on Life in Seven Songs, a podcast from The San Francisco Standard, hosted by Sophie Bearman. The show asks guests to pick music that sheds light on the story of their lives. Misrach’s choices included songs by Bonnie Raitt, a friend since childhood; Bob Dylan, who provided the soundtrack to Misrach’s time as a student at U.C. Berkeley; and Steve Reich, who Misrach loved to listen to while driving through the desert for his Desert Cantos series.

Through his selection, Misrach tells the story of his development as a photographer, from his first series documenting Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, to the photographs he made in Hawaii showing people floating in the vast ocean, for his series On the Beach.

Listen to the episode here.

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“The Fertile Mind of Sophie Calle”

Rebecca Robertson — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 19:18:10 +0000

During an interview with Sophie Calle at her studio outside Paris, Mary Kaye Schilling of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, talks with the artist about her life and career. The interview marks the opening of Sophie Calle: Missing, a 2017 exhibition at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

Read the full article here.

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In Conversation with Miguel Arzabe

Rebecca Robertson — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:45:22 +0000

In a 2025 talk hosted by FOG Design+ Art, Kota Ezawa and fellow Bay Area artist Miguel Arzabe speak with curator Natasha Boas about shared themes in their work, including the role of labor and time and their engagement with art history.

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In Conversation with Christopher Bedford

Rebecca Robertson — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:44:56 +0000

In a 2025 event hosted by FOG Design+ Art, Carrie Mae Weems presents selections from her work, and talks with SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford. The pair discuss Weems’s use of beauty as a tool to engage the audience, and how museums have responded five years after the 2020 reckoning with institutional racism.

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On becoming an artist

Rebecca Robertson — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 21:18:38 +0000

In a 2014 interview from SFMOMA, Sophie Calle recounts her serendipitous path to becoming an artist, beginning with a chance stay at a photographer’s home in Bolinas, California, and an experimental visit to a cemetery with a camera.

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The Making of Theia

Christa Palazzolo — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 18:41:15 +0000

In the series Theia, Adam Fuss expands his exploration of botanical themes. Named for the hypothetical planet that may have crashed into the Earth and formed our moon, Theia invokes a calamitous occurrence that ushers in renewal and new beginnings. To create the images, Fuss positions fresh spring flowers onto a sheet of thick paper, flattens the arrangement with a metal plate, and presses it through a table-top etching press. The resulting hyper-realistic artworks appear deceptively as three-dimensional compositions, floating against a white space.

Explore more works in Theia here

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Lee Friedlander and Richard Avedon in Front of the Camera

Christa Palazzolo — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:08:10 +0000

In 2002, while preparing for a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Richard Avedon made a list of people he would like to photograph, including artists, writers, performers, and friends. Among the subjects was Lee Friedlander, who agreed to the portrait on the condition that in exchange, he could photograph Avedon. On May 24, 2002, the two met in Friedlander’s backyard to make the pictures, accompanied by Avedon’s assistants.⠀⠀

Lee Friedlander photographs Richard Avedon, 2002. Photography by Maria Friedlander

Lee Friedlander, Avedon, 2002

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

The following year, Lee’s wife Maria sent Jeffrey Fraenkel some of the photographs from the day. In her letter, saved in the gallery’s archives, Friedlander writes about the encounter. “I remember thinking it was an historic moment taking place down in our backyard, so I grabbed my point/and/shoot camera and followed them,” she notes.

Richard Avedon photographs Lee Friedlander, 2002. Photography by Maria Friedlander

Richard Avedon, Lee Friedlander, Photographer, New City, NY, May 24, 2002

gelatin silver print, 24 x 20 inches (sheet) [61.0 x 50.8 cm]

A few years later Jeffrey Fraenkel wrote about the afternoon in Aperture (in an essay originally published as part of an exhibition catalogue), exploring the differences between the photographers and the artistic traditions they each came from. Although “made within a few seconds and a few feet of each other,” their photographs appear to come “from entirely different planets,” he observes.

Read the Aperture article here.

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