For over twenty years, British-born artist Adam Fuss has reconsidered the devices traditionally utilized in the pursuit of making a photograph.  His most recent series, entitled Ark, recovers the 19^th century daguerreotype process to create his photograms.  In this process, Fuss creates his images on polished copper plates after being exposed to mercury and chemical vapors.  With his photogram work Fuss draws upon one of the early photographic traditions used by such pioneers as William Henry Fox Talbot.  Adam Fuss has combined the two primal photographic processes of daguerreotype and photogram to achieve a 21^st century end.  In this way, Fuss subverts the primacy of the camera and celebrates the print as an independent object.  By its very nature, the daguerreotype captures an aspect of reality often inaccessible by more traditional means.  This series marks a culmination in Fuss’s investigation of these alternative photographic methods.

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Adam Fuss’s dozen photograms included in the show each define a unique moment.  Made over a limited period of time, the artist recorded the successive effects on a pool transformed by a droplet of water.  Each varying image of induced ripples created through this process comes to exemplify a transcendental moment.  Fuss’s waves expand infinitely.  These waves embody a metaphorical moment that contains all life.  Fuss’s series is defined by the ephemeral, each moment marking a fleeting revelation.  Fuss’s large snake powder photograms also included in the show compliment the Ark series.  These large-scale works offer a sense of the infinite movement and creative energy of life.  One senses in Fuss’s work that he does not try to manipulate these subjects that are, by their nature, ambiguous.  Rather, he resolves himself to their inherent mystery. This is largely accomplished through Fuss’s photographic method that hinges on chance occurrence.

Adam Fuss was the subject of a solo retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany in 2002-2003.  His photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among many other public institutions.

Adam Fuss is presented concurrently with the exhibition Lee Friedlander: Apples and Olives.

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Lee Friedlander has confronted the urban, social and natural landscape in a manner that has reinvented new ways of envisioning the modern world. With Apples and Olives, an exhibition of photographs taken between 1997 and 2004, Friedlander has moved away from urban territories. He has chosen instead to investigate two of humankind’s oldest harvested crops: apples and olives. Photographing in Europe and New York state, Friedlander captures apple and olive trees in varying seasons and climates.  In these medium format, black and white images Friedlander applies his signature wide-angle view technique best known within an urban context to a more natural setting. A rhythmic energy fills every inch of these photographs. Branches twist and turn to create leaping shadows on leaf-filled fields. Apples jut out at surprising angles to reveal surprising abstract forms. Friedlander’s photographs ask us to consider anew the endless sources of formal possibilities present in the natural world.

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Lee Friedlander was chosen this year as the recipient of the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. This past summer, his work was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Apples and Olives will be accompanied by a fully illustrated book published by Fraenkel Gallery in collaboration with Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden.

Apples and Olives can be seen concurrently with Adam Fuss in the main gallery.

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Since the late 1960s, Robert Adams has photographed the changing American landscape. Free from distortion or moral posture, Adams’s pictures are poised, earnest portraits of the land as we have come to inhabit it. Adams’s images present an undiminished geography including both the natural and man-made and testify that an absolute beauty endures despite humanity’s intrusion.

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Robert Adams circa 1970 will include a selection of rare and unpublished vintage prints from the 1970s. In these images, Adams’s theme is the transformation of the wide-open spaces of the American West into the one-dimensional America of the present. Among the photographs being exhibited are Adams’s rarely seen images of interiors of stores and suburban homes. These photographs bring to forefront the plasticized and wood-veneered surfaces of the modern American home.

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Robert Adams circa 1970 will run concurrently with an exhibition of his newest work, Turning Back, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is accompanied by a catalog published by Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery. An exquisitely printed and signed exhibition poster will be available for $25, of which all the proceeds will go to RiverVision, in Astoria, Oregon, a group of individuals united to make the U.S. less dependent on foreign, unstable, and non-renewable energy sources.

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Born in Germany in 1905 and trained as a painter, Gutmann took up photography in 1933 and supported himself as a photojournalist after immigrating to the United States. A student of the German expressionist painter Otto Mueller, Gutmann brought to the task of documenting his new surroundings a sensibility nurtured in the avant-garde circles of Berlin. He became fascinated by the popular culture of the United States. “I was seeing America with an outsider’s eyes — the automobiles, the speed, the freedom, the graffiti,” he explained in a 1989 interview, and his powerful images, which record “the almost bizarre, exotic qualities of the country,” established his reputation.

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Having settled in San Francisco, he helped link the West Coast to European modernism, inspiring later generations of photographers through his unique capacity to disclose the ambiguities and oddities within the commonplace. With a European’s cultural background and an eye trained in the German avant-garde, Gutmann observed aspects of American culture that eluded most American artists of his time.

To mark what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday, Fraenkel Gallery will be exhibiting a cross-section of paintings, drawings, and photographs from his prodigious career. Gutmann brought several of these paintings to San Francisco in 1933, and they hung on the walls of his home until his death in 1988, at the age of 93.

Gutmann has been the subject of a number of important international museum exhibitions, including a major retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1989, which traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

JOHN GUTMANN at 100 can be seen concurrently with Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Photographs XVII.

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This is the seventeenth installation of the exhibition known for its eclectic group of artists, some familiar and others unknown.  This exhibition provides the gallery with an opportunity to present a lively showing of recently acquired photographs that span a range inclusive of both flea market finds and historic treasures.

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Among this year’s highlights is Eugene Atget’s surrealist Fête du Trône, made in 1926, the year before his death.  This print’s history includes possession by Tristan Tzara, the poet and essayist best known as a founder of Dada.  Lee Friedlander, whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, will be represented in a group of early and recent pictures.  Also on view will be several little-known imperial plate photographs by Carleton Watkins, made in California and Oregon circa 1880; an extraordinary study of clouds over Santa Monica by Edward Weston, from 1936; a curious selection of anonymous photographs from both the 19th and 20th centuries and two new portraits by Katy Grannan, one of the most noted artists in last year’s Whitney Biennial.  Other works from Grannan’s series Mystic Lake will be exhibited at Fraenkel Gallery this coming January.

Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XVII can be seen concurrently with the exhibition, JOHN GUTMANN at 100.

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Obsessions of the Oculist is an exhibition that brings together a number of objects and oddities having to do with the act of seeing, including eye charts, eye tests, eye signs, glass eyes, and other paraphernalia. The curator Sheri Sheridan has placed emphasis especially on objects from the first half of the twentieth century. The exhibition includes several anonymous photographs that take eyes and seeing as their subject.

Obsessions of the Oculist will be seen concurrently with a survey of the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–1972), a photographer who made his living as an optometrist in the town of Lexington, Kentucky.

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The photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) defy convention. They have been called visionary, surrealistic, and meditative. Fascinated by the uncanniness of ordinary life, Meatyard made mysterious staged images using his friends and family—often involving masks and abandoned spaces—that are familiar and disturbing at the same time.

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From 1953 until his untimely death in 1972, Ralph Eugene Meatyard explored what he called the “photographic.” Shortly into his photographic life, Meatyard began experimenting with the technical and formal attributes of the camera. Using long exposures to record light reflecting off water, extreme focus for his “no-focus” images, and low depth of field for his “Zen twigs” series Meatyard defied traditional photographic means.  By 1960, he was regularly making photographs of his three children in abandoned rural Kentucky mansions and in the forests surrounding them. Highly imaginative, even surrealistic, the photographs evoke a world not normally acknowledged with the human eye. They suggest the complex emotions associated with childhood, intimacy, loss, and destruction. These images, which form the largest component of the exhibition, are what Guy Davenport has called “charming short stories that have never been written.”

Meatyard was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and moved to Lexington in 1950, after serving in the U.S. Navy and studying at Williams College and Illinois Wesleyan University. Meatyard spent most of his life in Lexington, where he worked as an optician at his shop Eyeglasses of Kentucky and photographed in his spare time. In 1956, summer workshops at Indiana University brought him in contact with such influential photographers as Henry Holmes Smith, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. These interactions, alongside his deep friendships with Thomas Merton, Guy Davenport and other thinkers and literati of Lexington, paved the way for Meatyard to launch his own photographic vision. Solo and group exhibitions soon followed across the country. His prodigious career ended in 1972 when he died of cancer.

RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD is presented concurrently with the exhibition Obsessions of the Oculist.

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Hujar was the quintessential New York artist, living and working in the East Village and throughout the downtown area from the age of sixteen. His urban nighttime photographs comprise a significant portion of his life’s work, taking such varied subjects as Wall Street’s corporate architecture, costumed Halloween partygoers, dilapidated domestic interiors, cruisy city parks, barren loading docks, and trash-strewn parking lots. Hujar photographed the World Trade Center when it was still new, the Meatpacking District when it still lived up to its name, and the West Side Highway before the coming of Battery Park City. Sometimes playful, often bleak, these photographs have an underlying sadness that is bound up in the palpable mortality of all Hujar’s subjects, from late-night revelers to the shifting, often decaying urban landscape.

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Enormously influential on his fellow artists, musicians, writers, and performers, Hujar was a central figure at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. His work inspired many of today’s most celebrated photographers very early in their careers: among others, Nan Goldin has said she would never have become a photographer had it not been for Peter Hujar. “He was a magician,” Goldin writes: “His work, like so few photographs, can’t be forgotten and becomes even deeper and more compelling over time. Peter’s work is not just photography—it’s about birth and death and the stages of life and varieties of identity and all the friends in-between.”

Peter Hujar died of AIDS in 1987. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland. His pictures are included in this winter’s New Museum exhibition East Village USA and in the Wattis Institute’s exhibition Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists, opening in January at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston.

The exhibition has recently been on view at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and is accompanied by a hard-cover book reproducing all the photographs in the exhibition and including an essay by the curator Robert Nickas, published by Fraenkel Gallery and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Peter Hujar: Night is presented concurrently with the exhibition Martina Mullaney.

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Martina Mullaney has approached a difficult subject with a powerful new sensibility. She has not given us sentimentalized portraits of homeless people, but rather a deeper look at what life may be like for the down-trodden. Ms. Mullaney has found beauty in the sparse furnishings of hostels and homeless shelters. This is a hard-fought beauty though, the pictures are laden with unease, one must question whether it is acceptable to look at these photographs as we would any others. Martina Mullaney’s photographs raise important questions about how an artist represents the experience of other people, impoverished or otherwise.

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In Martina Mullaney’s work, each photograph is composed identically, the mattress comprising the bottom third of the photograph and the wall next to the bed filling the top two-thirds of the frame. The photographs resemble color-field paintings, and much as the colors in such paintings reveal depth with extended viewing, details in the walls are found that are easily overlooked. Scratches, holes, stains, splatters, dirty finger-prints and electrical plugs adorn the walls next to the mattresses. The walls come in an array of discomfortingly seductive, muted colors. The mattresses, pillows and blankets that lie atop the beds are savage in their uncleanliness, but striking in their variety of color, texture and shape.

Martina Mullaney was born in Ireland in 1972. She currently lives and works in London, where she received a Masters Degree from the Royal College of Art in 2004. Her work has been exhibited abroad, including the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, Ireland, in 2004, and Ffotogallery in Wales in 2002.

MARTINA MULLANEY is presented concurrently with the exhibition PETER HUJAR: NIGHT.

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Irving Penn’s current body of work is comprised of the lowest of subjects, spit-out gum on the sidewalk.  The enlarged views of the gum present a wide array of visual interest, sometimes stuck on the ground in fascinating shapes, while others are bulbous and shiny, with layers folded in intricate patterns. The latter shapes are reminiscent of Mr. Penn’s closely cropped nudes of voluptuous women from the 1940’s and 50’s. The Underfoot series is an extension of his famous cigarettes and paper cup photographs from the 1970’s, the major distinction being that Mr. Penn has, for the first time, ventured out of the tightly controlled environs of his studio to photograph the street, literally. At first glance, the stark, beautifully executed black and white photographs appear somber and straight-forward. With further investigation into the compositions, images begin to emerge.  Faces appear, and once abstract shapes begin to take humanistic qualities. The chewed gum photographs convey aspects of classical marble sculptures and cubist paintings. Skulls, abstracted heads, lovers entwined, and fetal babies have all materialized in these discarded wads.  Katherine Ware, Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where the exhibition previously appeared) has stated that studying these photographs is an exercise not unrelated “to looking at clouds.”

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First an art director, then a painter, Irving Penn came to photography in 1944. For nearly fifty years he has excelled in many different genres, producing a body of work that has had a major impact on fashion, portraiture, nudes, still life, and advertising. Internationally recognized, his work is included in the collections of many major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery, Washington D.C. and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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