Though these four artists are friends, and have been working along related lines for many years, this is the first exhibition to examine their work as a whole. In collaboration with each artist, seven exemplary pictures were selected, charting earliest successes through more recent projects. For the purposes of this exhibition and publication each artist agreed to release works considered pivotal in his or her evolution.

The pictures comprising Under the Sun seem unaligned to most photography of the past one hundred fifty years. They are characterized by a sense of photography distilled to its basic elements, and manifest a peculiar physical presence due in varying degrees to unfamiliar subject matter, assertive use of scale, and vibrant, dramatic color. Often made without a camera, sometimes of nothing more than paper and light, they are grounded in abstraction. But what most distinguishes the work of this “Gang of Four” — Bucklow, Derges, Fabian Miller and Fuss — is their conscious and deliberate engagement with the metaphysical possibilities of the medium.

Though all are British born, Christopher Bucklow currently lives and works in Venice and Adam Fuss in New York City.  Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller reside in Dartmoor, England.

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Lee Friedlander has been a working photographer for over thirty years, taking as his subject the urban, social, and natural landscape. He is the recipient of countless awards and fellowships including a MacArthur Grant (1990) and the MacDowell Colony Award (1986). His work has been widely exhibited and published, including Letters from the People, Like a One-Eyed Cat and The Jazz People. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog of the same title, published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York.

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E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of Storyville prostitutes became famous in 1970, when they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Bellocq was more or less unknown before that, but with the show and the accompanying book, his mysterious, hauntingly beautiful portraits reaches a wide audience, and Bellcoq became a celebrated figure in the history of photography. Of the eighty-nine plates discovered by the photographer Lee Friedlander, many have remained unpublished and unseen. Fraenkel Gallery will mount an exhibition of twenty-one prints, many not shown before, to accompany the long-awaited release of Bellocq, only the second book to be published of Bellocq’s work (by Random House, New York).

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Bellocq is remembered as an odd man whose craft seems to have absorbed most of his energy and interest. His pictures tell us perhaps more about him than can those who knew him only as a strange figure with a camera who kept very much to himself. They reveal an artist of considerable skill and uncultivated but compelling sensibility. Writes John Szarkowski, “Bellocq’s prostitiutes are beautiful…Beautiful innocently or tenderly or wickedly or joyfully or obscenely, but all beautiful, in the same sense that they are present, unique, irreplacable, believable, receptive.”

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One of the highlights of the exhibition will be the sensuous Edward Weston print, Nude (Miriam Lerner), 1925. In this picture of a carefully cropped woman’s torso, Weston deftly explores the subtle inflections of light over folds of skin. Also on view for the first time in the United States will be the work of South Korean photographer Byung-Hun Min whose photographs of markings left by weeds growing on walls and a foggy view of Seoul exude quiet humility. By contrast, the British artists Gilbert & George take a gleefully satiric look at Western values in their postcard sculpture, Gold World, 1989.

Among the more unusual photographs in the exhibition are several anonymous works, especially two related pictures, the first of several Namoa pirates lined up before their execution, and the second, taken immediately afterward, of their decapitated heads mounted on pikes.

Also featured are recent images by Adam Fuss, Nan Goldin, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Jack Pierson, J. John Priola, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Catherine Wagner among others.

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Robert Adams has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989 he was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work and writings on photographs have appeared in numerous books and monographs.

Robert Adams: West from the Columbia will be on view at Fraenkel Gallery concurrently with Carleton Watkins: Recent Acquisitions.

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