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Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) is one of the few artists in any medium to sustain a consistent body of influential work over five decades. The result of singular talent coupled with dogged, indefatigable effort, Friedlander has photographed almost every day since the late 1950s. More than a few of his friends have observed that for Lee Friedlander, working is the equivalent of breathing. In the pre-dawn hours he can be found in his darkroom, developing negatives, studying contact sheets, and printing. He has never had an assistant. Every Friedlander photograph in existence was printed by the artist himself, a claim that can be made for very few photographers.

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The Fraenkel Gallery exhibition presents two photographs from every year since 1960, allowing viewers the rare opportunity to examine the step-by-step growth of an artist over fifty years. New subject matter or a fresh approach may appear in one year, to be developed and refined over following decades. Friedlander’s subject matter includes street scenes, portraits, landscapes, interiors, still lifes, nudes, trees, self portraits – in short, most of the central subjects of the history of photography.

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Friedlander’s career was the focus of a major survey organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His most recent body of work, America by Car, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The post 1960 – 2010 or How I Got from There to Here in 100 Pictures or Less appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Mel Bochner is considered a pioneer of the Post-Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Best known for his paintings, drawings and installations, in the mid to late 1960s Bochner became deeply involved with photography. This exhibition focuses on Bochner’s ground-breaking photographs from that time period, and shows how those formed much of the basis for Bochner’s work up to the present. Bochner was fully involved in the selection for this project, which in addition to photographs includes Smudge, a wall drawing of blue powder pigment from 1968, the 1970 set of Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), and several paintings, include NO, dating from this year.

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Bochner also collaborated closely on the exhibition catalog, the cover of which is made of plexiglas. The catalog includes an essay by Jeffrey Weiss, recently appointed curator of the Panza collection at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, tracing Bochner’s evolution from the 1960s to the present.

The post Photographs and Not Photographs 1966-2010 appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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Katy Grannan’s own work in photography examines the desire of her subjects to offer themselves up to the camera lens. The exhibition she has assembled for Fraenkel Gallery includes the work of painters, sculptors, and photographers such as Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Robert Bechtle, Diane Arbus, E.J. Bellocq, Jim Dine, Lee Friedlander, Peter Hujar, Jordan Kantor, Henri Matisse, Barry McGee, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Misrach, Linda Ridgway, William Wiley, Garry Winogrand, and several works by unknown photographers. Grannan lives in Berkeley, California.

Other artists whose work will be on view across the four galleries include Lutz Bacher, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Alighiero e Boetti, Miriam Bohm, Vija Celmins, Gregory Crewdson, Maureen Gallace, Charlie Harper, Matt Keegan, Los Carpinteros, Henry Wessel, Tom McKinley, Richard McLean, Manuel Neri, Trevor Plagen, Mitzi Pederson, Robert Rauschenberg, Will Rogan, Ed Ruscha, Iran Do Espirito Santo, Sara VanDerBeek, Garth Weiser, Rachel Whiteread, Steve Wolfe and many others.

The post They Knew What They Wanted, Curated by Katy Grannan appeared first on Fraenkel Gallery.

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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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After an extended stay in southern California where Adams worked with a 4×5” view camera, he returned to his well-loved Colorado in 1984. Equipped with a new 28mm lens for his Nikon, Adams discovered unexpected possibilities afforded by the hand-held camera and wide-angle lens.

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Wandering the Colorado plains, the mountains west of Denver, and the San Luis Valley abutting the Mexican border, Gone? Colorado in the 1980s is as much a walking meditation as a photographic study. Light’s multifarious manifestations sustain this work, saturating a field, glistening through trees. Here, Adams found a buoyancy of spirit that complements his better-known work addressing urban growth.

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In 2009, Adams was the recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. His numerous monographs include The New West, From the Missouri West, Los Angeles Spring, To Make It Home, Listening to the River, West From the Columbia, California, and Turning Back. Later this year, his life’s work will be the subject of a major retrospective and a multi-volume monograph organized by the Yale University Art Gallery.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Christ in a lobby and Other Unknown or Almost Known Works by Diane Arbus, on view from January 7 through March, 6, 2010. The exhibition has been selected and assembled by the sculptor Robert Gober.

In 1976, Gober made an untitled still-life drawing depicting the cover of the 1972 monograph Diane Arbus, along with other household items: a pack of cigarettes, sunglasses, coins, an ashtray. That drawing–still in the artist’s collection, and to be included in the forthcoming exhibition–signaled an early appreciation of Arbus’s photographs, and Gober’s subsequent body of work evidences certain affinities with hers, including Arbus’s willingness “to look at everything that you weren’t supposed to” [Gober, in a 2005 interview].

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In the summer of 2009, Gober was invited to study a heretofore little known body of Arbus’s photographs, and to select a group for exhibition. He chose approximately forty-eight works spanning the artist’s career, beginning with Girl watching a soap bubble, Central Park, N.Y.C., from 1956, to a photograph made the last year of Arbus’s life, Blonde girl with a hotdog in the park, N.Y.C., 1971. Other works in Gober’s selection focus on housewives, muscle men, characters on movie screens, couples, nudists, carnival performers, and people on the street–subjects that when seen by Arbus became entirely her own.

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Diane Arbus is one of the most influential photographers in the history of the medium. Her work was the subject of the book and retrospective, Diane Arbus Revelations, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003. An exhibition of Arbus’s photographs, organized by the Jeu de Paume, Paris, is scheduled to open in the fall of 2011 and travel to other European institutions.

In January 2010, the work of both Arbus and Gober will be exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Focus on Artists, highlighting artists whose work the Museum has collected in depth.

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