Since 1985, the photographs of Adam Fuss have been made primarily without a camera. While technology has facilitated a trend toward large, digitally enhanced color photographs, Fuss makes images pared down to the most essential elements of the medium: light and paper.  Frequently referred to as a contemporary master of the photogram, Fuss creates images by positioning objects directly onto a photographic medium and then exposing the whole to light, a process practiced by early pioneers in photography such as Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins.  The present survey is comprised of photograms, daguerreotypes, and pinhole photographs created over the past 17 years.  Though the subject of each image differs from the next, the works are connected by the presence of a simple yet poignant visual element, the circle.

Often Fuss’s cyclical forms are recognizable; a web of ripples caused by a vibration on water’s surface or a luminous sunflower bloom.  Other subjects, such as his large spiral light pieces, are ambiguous, produced by a flashlight suspended from a ceiling and allowed to swing in ever decreasing circles towards the center of a large sheet of photographic paper.  Hued gels covering the lens of the flashlight determine the colors of the spirals.  Fuss’ photographic methods, frequently contingent on chance occurrence, are analogous to his perceptions of the inherent mysteries in life, death, and birth.

Fuss’s work is currently the subject of a major survey at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is included in the collections of major museums throughout the world.

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RALPH EUGENE MEATYARD was born in Normal, Illinois in 1925 and lived in Lexington, Kentucky, where he made his living as an optician. Working outside of the photographic mainstream, his imagery consisted largely of symbolic dramas, set in ordinary, often abandoned places and enacted mostly by his own family. Taken as a whole, his photographs seem to embody a belief that revelation does not depend on sight.

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The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater is Meatyard’s swan song and was produced primarily during the two years before his death of cancer in 1972. 

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The series consists of 64 portraits of “Lucybelle Crater”, a name adapted by Meatyard from a character in a Flannery O’Connor short story.  In each picture, “Lucybelle” is played by Meatyard’s wife Madelyn wearing a dime-store hag’s mask, paired with various family members and friends in a transparent second mask that had an aging effect on its wearers. The sequence and structure of the series is that of anyone’s family album, beginning with immediate family and extending out to other relations and finally to a larger circle of friends. Meatyard clearly intended that the identity of each person need not be known to the viewer of this work, for he gave every character the same name — Lucybelle Crater.  In the final image of this series, made shortly before his death, Meatyard and his wife traded clothes and masks, having returned to the garden where the first photo had been realized.

The long out-of-print book of the “Lucybelle” photographs has had an enormous influence and near-legendary reputation since its posthumous publication in 1974.  This will be the first exhibition of the complete vintage set of The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.

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This year’s highlights include a hitherto unpublished photograph by Diane Arbus: New York Skyline in a Lobby, NYC, from 1971; two vintage prints by Eugene Atget that have recently been acquired from the Museum of Modern Art; a group of photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, whose Estate is now represented by the gallery; and a remarkable “simulated” image of breaking icebergs constructed by a stir crazy seaman whose ship was frozen ice in the Sea of Tchoukotka in 1934.

This year’s Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures XV also includes a particularly strong contingent of anonymous photographs, several of which are included in the new book, I’m Still Living (Chronicle Books), co-authored by Gallery Director, Frish Brandt.

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Though the untitled photographs are an extension of Misrach’s investigation of the desert, they mark a radical departure within his work. In these extremely detailed photographs (made from 8 x 10-inch negatives) of desert scrub brush, it is difficult to determine precisely what one is looking at. The scale and perspective of the work calls into question the viewer’s own relation to the object being photographed. Misrach’s photographs of the tangled desert undergrowth become complex and thorny abstractions, uncannily recalling the energy and controlled chaos of Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm or Lavender Mist.

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Also on view will be three large works from Battleground Point, the twenty-fourth installment from Misrach’s “Desert Cantos.” These works, first exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington last fall, were made in Nevada’s Carson Sink, in an area that floods every decade. The photographs depict a watery desert landscape in which sky, sand, and water are connected in an unearthly vision.

One of the most influential photographers working today, Misrach has received numerous awards, including a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in major museums around the world.

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The exhibition will include an exceptionally rare four-part panorama of San Francisco, dated circa 1879. Watkins’ obsessively detailed images persuasively convey the visual texture of the rapidly expanding city. The exhibition will also include several mammoth-plate photographs from Watkins’ first trip to Yosemite in 1861, and a dramatic view of people on the ferry boat “Solano,” as it readies to depart the dock in Pt. Costa, circa 1876.

Carleton Watkins is generally viewed as the most important American photographer of the nineteenth century.  The images he produced helped shape Americans’ understanding of the then-unfamiliar landscape of the American West, to such an extent that they contributed to the establishment of the national parks system. Watkins often hauled his cameras, tripods, darktents, glass plates and chemicals through difficult terrain and into treacherous situations, making exposures up to one hour long. What resulted were photographs of consummate craftsmanship that illuminated Watkins’ passion for his subject and the particular intelligence he brought to it.

Carleton Watkins spent the majority of his working years in San Francisco. His “Yosemite Gallery”, located on Montgomery Street, first presented his photographs of the West to the public. Much of his life’s work, including all of his original glass negatives, was destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906.

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The years 1947-1949 represent an astonishingly inventive period in Irving Penn’s five-decade long career. This period is notable not only for the artist’s high-level of achievement, but also for the surprising number of images he made that are now solidly lodged in the pantheon of twentieth-century photography. The years circa 1948 are celebrated as well for the wide array of subject matter his work embraced, resulting in unforgettable portraits, nudes, still-lifes, and fashion photographs.

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IRVING PENN circa 1948 includes definitive portraits of Alfred Hitchcock, the Duchess of Windsor, Truman Capote, and Georgia O’Keeffe, all made from highly detailed 10 x 8 negatives. Several of Penn’s great, monolithic nudes will also be seen. A survey concentrating solely on Penn’s nudes takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, concurrently with the Fraenkel Gallery exhibition.

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Other images range from the classic Girl in Bed on the Telephone (Jean Patchett), and Woman with Roses (Penn’s wife Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in a Lafaurie dress), to the wrestling Dusek Brothers [see above] and one of the artist’s most unsettling images, Brother and Sister, Cuzco — all of which were made during the same fertile two year period.

All the photographs in the exhibition were printed by the photographer himself, using gelatin-silver or platinum-palladium papers. After more than fifty years Penn’s work continues to be relevant for its great refinement of craft, for the wit and grace of its formal invention, and for its unequaled sensitivity to the quality and character of light.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Peter Hujar from January 3 through March 2, 2002.

Peter Hujar is best known for his powerful and piercing portraits, uncompromising fastidiousness, and devoted friendships. He remained an artist’s artist, revered and respected by painters, performers and photographers (among them, Nan Goldin), until his death from AIDS in 1987. His friends frequently speak of him as the standard to which they held themselves. As Nan Goldin writes, “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way. Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh. His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.”

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Although he did publish one book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, he was not widely recognized until after his death. Goldin adds, “He lived in different worlds, he touched many people, and 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.”

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The works on view include several remarkable self-portraits, as well as other portraits of such diverse subjects as William Burroughs, Divine, Diana Vreeland, David Wojnarowicz and Susan Sontag. Also included are several portraits of animals, and haunting images of the catacombs at Palermo.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Nan Goldin: Recent Work.

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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Nan Goldin: Recent Work, from January 3 through March 2, 2002.

This exhibition consists of recent photographs by Nan Goldin which explore themes of love, identity and sexuality. The photographs were made in France, Italy and in New York City. Many of the images are of couples (all very much part of Goldin’s “family”) in their private spaces, performing every day rituals. Yet even in these pedestrian activities, there is a warmth and openness intrinsic to these pictures. Goldin welcomes the viewer into her life and the lives of those she holds most dear, therefore the viewer trusts her and feels welcomed into the photograph. She says, “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody—it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on—I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.” The pictures are large format and printed in lush colors. There is a sincerity and honesty that imbues each photograph regardless of the subject matter.

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Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953. She began photographing in the 1970s, documenting her life by photographing the lives of her friends and family. She is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and has been exhibited widely at museums around the world.  She has published several books including The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and I’ll Be Your Mirror. Goldin currently resides and works in Paris.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Peter Hujar.

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