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In Prairie, a group of photographs first seen in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978, Adams looks at the vast stretches of grassy flatland that extend eastward from the Rocky Mountains, and the small towns that punctuate the expanse.

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In a selection of pictures from West from the Columbia, he concentrates on the charged space where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. He has written, “Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea.”

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The most recent photographs in the exhibition, dating from 2004, are Questions for an Overcast Day, a mysterious body of work that is an open-ended meditation on leaves and the solace found in forests. Through his thoughtful and socially concerned photographic practice, which includes extensive writings, Adams has had an enormous influence on several generations of artists.

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Over the past three decades, Christian Marclay has established himself as a formidable contemporary artist, exploring the rich juncture-points between the visual arts, film and mass-market musical culture. The photograms in this exhibition are made with music cassette tapes he physically disassembled. In some, the plastic cases form austere grids; in others, spools of unwound tapes have been strewn over the surface of the paper in loops and twists, recalling canvases by Twombly or Pollock. The titles of these works, including Allover (Dixie Chicks, Nat King Cole and Others) and Allover (LeVert, Barbara Streisand and Others), derive from the specific tapes used in making each image.

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The cyanotype process dates to the dawn of photography and was developed by the English scientist Sir John Herschel in 1842. Utilizing a light-sensitive chemical mixture, these cyanotypes were created by placing objects directly onto the surface of paper coated with the mixture. The resulting blue photograms reveal a silhouetted image that varies in darkness due to the opacity of the objects.

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Marclay’s artistic practice is grounded in the area between sight, sound, and all manner of recordings, whether visual or aural. His overall body of work spans sculpture, video, photography, music, performance and collage. His photograms reinvigorate two nearly-forgotten media: the cassette tapes of the 1970s and 80s and the cyanotypes of the 1840s.

The exhibition also includes continual screenings of Looking for Love, a 32-minute video work made in 2008.

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The nearly thirty photographs on view explore Penn’s radical and long-standing investigation into what constitutes beauty, an aspect of his career that has received only passing attention. These works reflect the artist’s deep appreciation for the diversity of human physiognomy, and challenge a media-driven and image-saturated society that has narrowed the very idea of beauty.

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Known for depicting his subjects with a rare combination of precision and compositional elegance, Penn’s work contrasts elements of the grotesque and the sublime. Throughout his early career, as a photographer at Vogue, and then later in his personal work, he consistently questioned and reinvented the parameters of physical beauty. His early nudes, from the late 1940s, were not exhibited until over three decades later. Alexandra Beller (D), Nude 132, and Nude 18 are studies of an exuberance of flesh.

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His subjects—from the highlands of Papua New Guinea to the high-society of the fashion world—are presented as distinct and particular. His portraiture is known for revealing the essentials of his sitter, devoid of superfluousness. In Five Okapa Warriors, New Guinea, the men face the camera frontally, their pierced nasal septums and bush arrows as rigid as their gaze. Several images in the exhibition obscure faces—Canvas Head With Hardware (Design by Jun Takahashi) and Football Face, among others—alluding to the masks of fashion and persona.

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Learoyd’s minutely detailed, large-scale color portraits do not look like other photographs. Made with a giant camera comprised of two rooms, Learoyd’s subject (generally a person, though sometimes an object such as a mirror) occupies one room containing a powerful light source, while the photographic paper occupies the adjacent camera obscura (“dark room” in Latin). Connecting the two rooms is a lens set within a bellows—an accordion-like contraption dating from the medium’s first century.

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Learoyd’s pictures are unique direct-positive images produced without a negative. The photographs on view are images made by the direct record of light reflecting from the subject to the photographic paper, yielding portraits of unsettling psychological intensity.

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Learoyd was born in 1966 in Lancashire, England
, and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. He lives and works in London. His photographs have recently been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others.

The exhibition Presences is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Sol LeWitt: Photographic Works 1968–2004. Comprised of approximately twenty objects, and made possible with the cooperation of the LeWitt Estate, this is the first gallery exhibition to focus solely on the artist’s investigations with photography.

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of the last half-century. Though perhaps best known for his wall drawings and “structures” (the term he preferred to “sculpture”), LeWitt also made an important, highly original body of work in photography that spanned the course of his career.

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Central to LeWitt’s approach to photography was the concept that the artist need not always make the photographs himself. His “cut-outs” from the 1970s, for example, began with commercially made aerial photographs of cities important to the artist, especially New York and Florence. In Part of Manhattan with Central Park, Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center Removed (1978), LeWitt excised with a mat knife three Manhattan landmarks, resulting in a jarring photographic object that prompts the viewer to reconsider the materiality of an urban landscape.

The earliest work in the exhibition, Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance But Little Value (1968), presents a grid of nine black & white photographs of the artist’s friends apparently digging a grave and burying a small wooden box. The photographs themselves—the physical representation of a conceptual act performed more than 35 years ago—have become the work of art.

Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographic studies of human and animal locomotion were a catalyst for LeWitt’s investigation of serial systems. The debt is evident in Brick Wall (1977), comprised of 30 black and white photographs of, as the title suggests, a brick wall. The assumption made by the viewer is that the wall has been photographed at regular intervals during the day from dawn to dusk; although, the gradual light changes seem artificial and perhaps more reminiscent of a predetermined tonal progression. Other multi-part works in the exhibition include Clouds (1978), a grid of 54 mounted color photographs, and Grid of Grids (1976), 64 mounted photographs of grates, drains, tiles, skylights, and other grids that can be found in the course of a day.

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The final work in the exhibition is A Sphere Lit From the Top, Four Sides, and All Their Combinations (2004). The title prescribes the process (LeWitt did not take the photographs himself) for making twenty-eight photographs of a sphere. The resulting photographs are arranged in a grid four high and seven wide, beginning with the featureless sphere starkly lit from the top, and ending with the sphere brightly lit from every direction. Each photograph documents a specific state of illumination while becoming part of an abstract narrative as the artist’s plan is executed.

Sol LeWitt’s work can be found in the collections of most serious museums of modern and contemporary art. His career was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000.

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For the past three years Katy Grannan has roamed the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, photographing strangers. Her subjects are most often people whom others pass by without notice, anonymous individuals who have now been transformed by photography’s peculiar magic.

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Grannan photographs her subjects in front of the type of white stucco walls that can be found anywhere. She works midday when the strong noon light, in tandem with the white walls, transforms her city streets into outdoor studios. The light is precise and indiscriminate, delineating in high-pitched detail Grannan’s hustlers, strutters, addicts and beauty queens. The timeless characters who populate Grannan’s Boulevards are a compendium of street types rendered with mesmerizing intensity, separated from their counterparts of past centuries by little more than costume or hairstyle.

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Katy Grannan lives and works in Berkeley. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

BOULEVARD is accompanied by an illustrated catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery and Salon 94, New York. This is Katy Grannan’s third solo exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery.

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