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No artist has a visual language for speaking about landscape, the politics of development, urbanization, and the eradication of the natural environment quite like that of Robert Adams. His photographs taken of the Los Angeles Basin, while they illustrate the extinction of a natural topography, evidence the birth of a new world—one which marries the rural with refuse—with an unexpected sort of optimism. The photographs included in this exhibition are of the environmental hybrids everywhere evident in the Los Angeles of the time: an abandoned, pocked mattress underneath a fecund tree; the glowing asphalt of two-lane streets cutting elegant Vs back and forth across an otherwise uninterrupted landscape.

Of his own work Adams has stated, “The operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared anymore.” His project is not to moralize or to condemn, but to observe and to abstract his observed world into photographs to offer for public interpretation. At the outset of this project, in 1978, Adams said, “As I understand my job, it is, while suggesting order, to make things appear as much as possible to be the way they are in normal vision.”

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Though made from the late seventies to the early 1980s, many considered this work too difficult and unsettling to be exhibited or published at the time. In conjunction with Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery has published a fully-illustrated hardcover catalog that accompanies this exhibition. With an introduction by Robert Hass, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, the catalog includes fifty-seven tritone reproductions.

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Portraiture has unwaveringly held strong rank among the categories of image-making for the challenges it inspires. Capturing the face and telling something of the subject’s psychology is an old riddle. The history of the document reveals countenances both clarified and confounded by their representations. About Faces. includes approximately fifty portraits spanning the history of photography and delivers images whose relationships to their subjects waver between distant, almost to the point of inscrutability, to strikingly intimate.

Considering the challenge of transcribing a face, About Faces. culls a group of portraits which are, by their nature and complexity, psychological portraits. These photographs map the intricate relationship between photographer and subject, the degree to which each concedes to the other in the project of making the portrait. All of the images demand the mediation of the viewer in order to extricate the subtext of the subject’s mind given the text of her face. Included in the exhibition are photographs by Diane Arbus (the unrelenting gaze offered us by the Woman in the Rose Hat), Chuck Close (with an intimate study of his own face), Nan Goldin (with a very recent self-portrait), Alfred Stieglitz (with a striking portrait of his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe), among others.

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SEGRAP XIII is up in conjunction with a selection of self-portraits by Lee Friedlander.

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Lee Friedlander has documented a lifetime in photographs, creating a thick and diverse body of work which has left an indelible imprint on the medium he has helped to fortify.  Among his most important subjects–once at the beginning of his career, and now thirty years later–is his own image.  With the photographic cornerstone of a monograph, Self-Portrait, originally published in 1970, Friedlander created an archetype for self-imaging.  Three decades later Friedlander re-acquainted himself with the far side of the camera and has said of this project, “I started again after I did a couple and realized that I’d metamorphosed into something else.  I wasn’t the same person any more, and I wanted to document that.”  The new stable of images re-asserts the artist’s most eminent qualities: his untiring relationship with photography, and his complex view of the world, which is at once unflinching, comic, and poignant. As a companion to the original Self-Portrait, the new monograph is available both as hardcover and softcover.

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In conjunction, the gallery will be exhibiting its thirteenth annual Several Exceptionally Good Recently Acquired Pictures (SEGRAP). This array ranges from a rare vintage Imogen Cunningham cubist still life from 1926 to Andreas Gursky’s monolithic Prada.

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The work bridges the space between literal and metaphorical, belonging at once to both one frame of reference and the other. Each of Priola’s compositions focus on a decisive, tangible and familiar object or place, each a precisely delineated world. But as Andy Grundberg describes in his introduction to Once Removed: “For what is traced in these photographs is not merely the object, or the sign of its residual physical presence avant the photograph, but the echo of its historical resonances and place in time.”  This is true as well of the new work. Each object or site suggests its history of narratives.

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These narratives center on a dialogue about what generally goes unseen; what, in contrast to its historical significance, now dissuades attention. The three bodies of work exhibited are white walls, numbers, and graves. One of the white walls, Nail, describes a place where a picture once hung but which is now defined by the lack of that object; without the object there, the stark site is often overlooked. Perhaps more explicit, the grave images focus on the absence of the people buried therein. It is Priola’s project to garner notice for these objects. Photography, for Priola, is a vehicle for making visible what is not visually attended to.

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Using the architecture of the camera obscura as her photographic mechanism, Lutter becomes the transcriber of outer architectures, facing buildings and industrial sites. Interested in places which reference particular historical moments or which have adopted an iconic stature, she transforms rooms which look upon her pending subjects into cameras, often inhabiting them during the length of each exposure.  Her images often reference movement over the hours or sometimes weeks of each exposure’s duration; in so doing she speaks to the transitory nature of the built environment itself.  The photographs display the microcosms of sites that are built and become altered over a course of time.

Lutter considers the original transcription of each place, which is created within the camera obscura, as its ultimate representation.  She chooses this, rather than using the rendered negative as an intermediate to an ultimate positive.  Her only amendment is to right each image, flipping it from its original, inverted recording.  The images give a visceral sense of what it is to see the way a camera does.

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Welsh Oaks, Graham’s recent body of work, brings the viewer inside the nature of the camera.  Rooted in the vestiges of the camera obscura model, the trees are presented as they would be seen inside the camera: as large-scale, upended simulacra.  Graham, though, uses a large format camera and as a result, unlike the camera obscura image in which the projected image is the negative, the photographs are printed as positives.  This has the effect of rendering familiarity, a relationship with the imagery as we know it.  Yet, Graham’s inversion causes the viewer to re-consider the natural subject, one which a history of landscape tradition has left over-mined and prosaic.

The photographs stand as portraits of startlingly singular and majestic trees in the English countryside.  The large-scale images nuance each subject in a manner related to the ways that portraits function.  The sense of weight in each photograph is ambiguous; land is replaced by atmosphere and vice versa, which, by disturbing standard viewing, prompts a re-consideration of each area of the composition.  Each image becomes a disembodied world which the viewer is invited to inhabit.

Also on view at Fraenkel Gallery during this time will be recent wall drawings by Sol LeWitt.

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On view alongside Sol Lewitt’s wall drawing’s are photographs by Canadian artist Rodney Graham.

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Though enormously influential, Avedon’s commercial work has largely overshadowed the photographs he made for his own purposes:

Avedon has said that by doing work for the magazines “I created my own Guggenheim fellowship,” meaning that his commercial work subsidized his more personal projects.

Avedon’s personal projects have been many and varied, spanning the map of contemporary social history.  Avedon’s studio has served as a site through which a vast number of the twentieth century’s most important historical figures have passed.  Included in the exhibition will be portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Dwight Eisenhower, Rudolf Nureyev, and Rose Mary Woods, among many others.  Seen together, these photographs become testament to Avedon’s role as one of our era’s most vigilant and passionate observers.

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Among the pieces on view during the exhibition will be the exceedingly rare large-format rayographs that Man Ray made at the beginning of his career as a serious artist.  As a way of seeing, this autobiographically named technique challenged conceptions of the physical world and its translation into visual media.  Of Man Ray’s style it is said:

Man Ray’s captivating rayograph of The Banjo is one such example displayed in the exhibition.  Also included in the show is the rare and intimate view Self-Portrait in Studio, the imaging of the self inherent both in the artist’s physical presence and in that of two of his rayographs depicted on his studio walls.

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