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Given the magnitude of the impact her photographs left in their wake, Diane Arbus’s career​ was brief—a mere fifteen years. Yet from the moment in 1956 when at the age of 33 she started​ numbering her negatives, beginning with #1, Arbus’s preoccupations appear to have been clear. Even her earliest photographs evidence an acute interest in singular people, the private place​s ​​they inhabit, and the mysteries that bring human beings together or keep them apart.

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Diane Arbus 1971–1956 examines the artist’s evolution through one picture per year, from the​ ​​perspective of a rear-view mirror. Tracing five threads of interest with approximately sixty​ ​photographs, the exhibition starts with images made shortly before her death in 1971 and​ ​progresses, in reverse order, toward their beginnings. By interweaving well-known images with many​ l​ess familiar ones (among them Woman in a fur stole, N.Y.C. 1971; An empty room, N.Y.C. 1968; Masked​ ​man in white, N.Y.C. 1967; and Person Unknown, City Morgue, N.Y.C. 1960), Diane Arbus 1971–1956​ ​offers an unconventional perspective on the artist’s oeuvre, and sheds light on the enigmatic process​ ​by which one work informs another.

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Diane Arbus Revelations, a major retrospective (and publication) organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003, travelled to seven institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Victoria and ​Albert Museum, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Diane Arbus: A Chronology was published by Aperture in 2011, containing many of her writings.

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Working with a large and portable camera obscura of his own construction, Learoyd has journeyed outside of his London studio, into the art-historically rich English countryside, producing images that have long been latent in his imagination. Bringing a refined studio sensibility to the geology of the landscape, at times Learoyd introduces an element of implied narrative through subtle intervention and staged figures.

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In Gordale Scar we are confronted with a vast rock wall, interrupted only at the upper right corner by a long view into a canyon; in For Cookham Read Holt we are presented, without explanation, the severed boughs of a magnolia tree suspended by white thread above a grassy lawn. Deftly woven through the exhibition are several in-studio still lifes and portraits that form a bridge with his continuing studio practice.

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Made within the past year, the roughly fifteen photographs exhibited in The Outside World are large-format, black-and-white gelatin silver contact prints, made using the negative/positive process invented roughly 170 years ago by Englishman W. H. Fox Talbot. Among the largest contact prints ever made—up to 80 inches wide—Learoyd has consistently produced photographic images using unconventional methods. The finished prints have an object quality that defies accurate reproduction.

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Known for penetrating portraits of couples, the ill and elderly, and an ongoing annual portrait (begun in 1975) of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon is a master of rich, telling detail. His new work is comprised of intimate self-portraits with his wife, Bebe, and landscape views made in France and his neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Grounded in a vocabulary of precision resulting until now solely from large format black-and-white negatives, Nixon here also introduces digital photographs made with a high-resolution hand-held camera. The primary setting is home life; the subtle register of daylight on skin, a close crop of backyard grass, detailed studies of eyes, faces and hair. Other views from further afield also appear—swaths of grass and sweeping wheat fields echo his close-up studies of tangled hair, and underscore a sometimes-overlooked connection to the natural world.

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Photography has been an integral element of Marclay’s practice since his earliest years as an artist. With an eye keenly (and paradoxically) attuned to sound-related subject matter, his photographs function both as source material for his works in other media as well as sophisticated, subtle works of art on their own terms. With an appearance of casual snapshots, Marclay’s photographs evidence a keen awareness of the history of the medium, particularly of Atget, Evans, and Eggleston. His travels have provided the artist with a rich array of sound-related subject matter; a bin of second-hand record albums in Michigan, a marching band outside a window in London, a painted ear on a brick wall in Montreal, a “Honk If You Love Silence” bumper sticker in Chicago, for example.

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While Marclay has exhibited small groupings of his photographs in the past, this is the first exhibition dedicated solely to his camera-related photography.

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Christian Marclay is widely recognized as one of the most adventurous artists of his generation. “The Clock,” his 24-hour film comprised of thousands of time-related clips from the history of cinema, has attracted viewers around the globe, and will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from April 6th through June 2nd, 2013.

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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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