In the fall of 1979, Fraenkel Gallery opened with an exhibition of photographs by Carleton Watkins. Those works had been discovered a short time before and placed at auction, setting a world-record price for photographs. Prints from the gallery’s first exhibition were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions. Now, thirty years later, the gallery is pleased to announce Carleton Watkins: Discoveries, a group of twenty-four recently discovered photographs in uncommonly rich condition, made between the years 1865 and 1881. The photographs will be on view from November 5 to December 30, 2009.

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Watkins is widely considered to be the most important American photographer of the nineteenth century. He spent the majority of his working years in San Francisco, where his “Yosemite Gallery” on Montgomery Street presented his photographs to the public. Much of his life’s work, including all of his glass-plate negatives, was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and thus any discovery of rare Watkins photographs is a notable event. The majority of the albumen prints on view were discovered in early 2008 in a small New England library. Several of these astonishing images are the only prints known to exist, and constitute a significant addition to the Watkins canon.

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All of the photographs on view are contact albumen prints made from glass negatives that measured approximately 17 x 21 inches each.  To achieve such images, Watkins hauled his cameras, tripods, darktents, glass plates and chemicals through difficult terrain and into treacherous situations, making exposures up to one hour long. The exhibition will include a strong selection of the Yosemite photographs that established Watkins’s reputation in the 1860s, and which played a role in the setting aside of Yosemite as a national treasure. Other works include a unique diptych panorama of San Francisco made from Telegraph Hill (circa 1875); a portrait of a majestic oak in Menlo Park (1874); and a heretofore unknown photograph of deer grazing beneath a grove of trees in San Mateo County (1874), all the more astonishing for the fact of being arrested in time before the lens of the unwieldy mammoth-plate camera.

Four years after the earthquake and the loss of his life’s work, Watkins was committed to the Napa State Hospital for the Insane. He died there six years later, a pauper, at the age of eighty-seven.

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Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields depict electricity, an element that — especially for photographers working with large-format negatives —  has historically been problematic and uncontrollable. Static electricity is well known to scar photographers’ negatives, and consequently to destroy their images. (This is one reason why carpets are not installed in darkrooms.) Viewing the challenge as an opportunity rather than a problem, Sugimoto has inverted the process and made nature’s static scars the focus of his attention.

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To create each image, Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a Van De Graaff 400,000-volt generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto film.   The result in each case is a unique, instantaneous image of an electrical current, sometimes resembling a meteor shower, or a “treeing effect” on the film. Sugimoto’s recent body of photographs continue to evidence the primordial and metaphysical qualities that define his oeuvre.

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The exhibition will also include two works from a parallel series, still in process, in which Sugimoto creates toned silver-gelatin prints from original negatives by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process.  Many of the negatives used in this series have never been printed before, as they date back to Talbot’s earliest experiments with photosensitizing paper, before he conceived of the negative/positive relationship.

Hiroshi Sugimoto has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad.  His work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery, London, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among many others.

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Nicholas Nixon: Self & City is comprised of thirty intensely detailed black and white photographs made over the last two years with an 11 x 14 inch view camera.  The camera is so large and cumbersome that few artists have been able to master it. Perhaps best known for his yearly portraits of his wife and her three sisters, Nixon in this case has turned the camera on himself, resulting in close-up studies of various body parts: face, hands, neck, and chest.  These details are depicted several times larger than they are in actuality, and alternate in the exhibition with the artist’s new cityscapes, surveying from above the details of Boston architecture. The building surfaces, window reflections, and shadows, interwoven with details of Nixon’s body, result in a meditation on one’s own place in the urban thicket.

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Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XXI provides viewers with an opportunity to examine, side by side, an unpredictable and eccentric selection of photographs spanning the medium’s history. The exhibition includes anonymous photographs from the 19th and early 20th century, as well as contemporary photographs made by some of the medium’s most innovative practitioners.

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This year’s highlights include new work by Idris Khan, created by photographing and layering Arabic texts of the mystical Sufi poet, Rumi; new color portraits by Katy Grannan, made along Sunset Boulevard in the searing sunlight of Los Angeles; and the British artist Richard Learoyd’s large, intense color portrait, “Jasmijn, to the Light,” made without a negative, using methods based on the camera obscura.  Also included are four 1960’s photographs by Ed Ruscha, of rooftops in southern California that mysteriously transcend their banality through Ruscha’s observation.

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Through approximately twenty works in various formats, the exhibition will present a concise array of the subjects of primary importance to the Bechers over their long career. At the same time, the works on view will highlight the artists’ evolving modes of presentation, from their diptychs of the early 1970s, through ambitious multi-part typologies, and the large-format single images first introduced in 1990 in a renowned exhibition at the DIA Art Foundation in New York. The most recent works to be exhibited were made in 2006, the year of Bernd Becher’s death.

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Since Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959, their work has focused on capturing a range of impressive industrial structures in Western Europe and America.  Water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, coal mine tipples, and grain elevators—each of their photographs isolates a large structure and describes it with the frontality and exactitude of an engineer’s diagram.  They would generally photograph on overcast days in the spring and fall, which provided them an even light with a vast tonal range.  This effect captured the structures in remarkable detail with intensified clarity, as if documenting the neglected relics of the industrial era.  This strict template furnishes the building blocks of what the Bechers came to call “typologies”—grids of pictures that reveal the basic forms of common functions while simultaneously highlighting the unique details of each particular specimen.

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Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Guggenheim, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.  Their work was shown in Documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 11 (2002).  Their teaching has influenced a generation of younger artists such as Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth.

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Important works by Edward Hopper are rarely seen outside of museums. The seven paintings inEdward Hopper & Company, all from one private collection, will include New York Corner, 1913, Circus Wagon, 1928, and Intermission, 1963, paintings which were seen in recent major Hopper retrospectives in London and Washington. Two drawings, Woman in the Sun, 1961, and Rooms by the Sea, 1951, are from the collection of the actor Steve Martin, while Summer Evening, 1947, will be on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery.

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The photographers whose work has been affected by Edward Hopper are so numerous as to make one wonder if any have completely escaped his gravitational pull. Edward Hopper & Company focuses on only eight, including Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank, all of whom found aspects of Hopper’s spirit echoing in their own sensibilities. The earliest of the photographs is by Walker Evans, whose interest in new types of American subject matter often intersected Hopper’s own.  The most recent of the photographs are by William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, whose parallel breakthroughs in the 1970s made it possible for ambitious color photographers to gain their footing.

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Hopper’s respect for humble subjects, his interest in the psychological, his depth as a landscape artist, and his sensitivity to the power of color to communicate feeling, are only some of the elements that may have led the writer Geoff Dyer to theorize that Hopper “could claim to be the most influential American photographer of the twentieth century—even though he didn’t take any photographs.” More than almost any American artist, Hopper has had a pervasive impact on the way we see the world—so pervasive as to be almost invisible. The paintings and photographs in Edward Hopper & Company are potent evidence of his legacy, each an acknowledgement of the implications of light, of silence, of clear-sightedness.

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Misrach’s new photographs mark a radical break with his work to date, in that they are his first images made without film. Working with a state-of-the-art digital camera yielding astonishing detail, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative along the color spectrum. The images extend the artist’s longstanding interest in landscape and seascape imagery, yet they transform nature in extreme and heretofore technologically impossible ways.

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Rocks vibrate with saturated tones, water’s surface shimmers as a vast enigmatic expanse, and surf takes on improbable deep red shades. Misrach’s panoramic “desert scrub” images become even more mysterious as colors are transformed into their negatives – branches become brushstrokes in a photographic “action painting.” The images are both foreign and familiar. Seen in total, the series suggests an apocalyptic vision of the natural world as we have known it.

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Richard Misrach has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. His work is represented in many permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Misrach is a recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In 2008, he received the Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art Photography and in 2002, the Kulturpreis for Lifetime Achievement in Photography from the German Society of Photography. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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