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Underscoring all of Goldin’s work is a fundamental respect for her subjects, people who recreate themselves according to their fantasies. Hers is a gender-free society in which her subjects exemplify Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “You are who you pretend to be.” The current exhibition will include work from her early (and ongoing) series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, The Other Side, (photographs made around Boston’s notorious drag bar in the 1970s), the recently published A Double Life, and several photographs made during the last year.

Nan Goldin began photographing at the age of 16. Internationally recognized, her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography along many others. In 1996 her work will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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During these years Winogrand photographed voraciously: marches, rallies, press conferences, games, strikes, demonstrations, moratoria, funerals, parades, award ceremonies, dinners, museum openings, victory celebrations, birthday parties, and one moon shot. In the process, he captured the social and political denizens who shaped the era: John F. Kennedy, John Glenn, Nelson Rockefeller, Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon among many others.

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Preceded by a century-long tradition of documenting current events, photographers of this new age, loaded with fast film, extremely handy single-lens reflex cameras, and wide-angle lenses began to shoot literally and figuratively “from the hip.” Winogrand’s pictures, formally groundbreaking and thematically unorthodox, capture the feel and texture of the most turbulent decade in recent American history and have influenced countless photographers since.

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Calle’s art and life have always been difficult to distinguish one from the other. There is no work in which this is more pronounced than in The Husband, the continuation of Calle’s ongoing project Autobiographical Stories.  Calle’s principal tool is language, with the visual component filling an illustrative role. In this way her work is not unlike the forensic process during a police investigation.  What seems to matter most is not so much the object, event, or person ostensibly described, but rather the residual presence — not of the thing itself, but what we as viewers feel, remember, or desire of it.

In both The Husband and the video Double Blind Calle documents her short marriage to Greg Shephard. Having known one another only briefly, Calle and Shephard set out on a road trip across America.  Working with video and still cameras they document their developing relationship by means of still and moving images. Their simultaneous narrations combined with the shot/reverse-shot cinematic technique give form to their dynamically opposing points of view. (Double Blind will be shown daily at the gallery at 1:00 p.m.)

In the series Last Seen… Calle juxtaposes people’s memories about absent artworks with the representations of the spaces once occupied by the works themselves.  The current exhibition will include two pieces based on the notorious theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Because the installation of the collection in the Gardner follows an unalterable plan laid down by the founder, the spaces where these works once hung remain empty.  Calle’s photographs depict these bizarre gaps and are accompanied by verbal recollections about the works, printed and framed to the same scale as the works themselves.

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Ten years in the making, Letters from the People captures language as our shared cultural reality. Through the inclusion of photographs ranging from commercial signs to graffiti, these photographs simulate the incessant visual noise of the urban world where disconnected messages and disembodied utterances compete for our attention. With a methodology closest to jazz Friedlander culls from the streets first letters, then numbers, and then messages, all fueled with social energy, ethnic diversity and cultural rhythms which attest to a fundamental freedom of expression. While some graphically advertise the quotidian of life (chicken, shoeshines, lunch), most express beliefs and yearnings. An elongated black “Sin” calls to us from a white wall; METS is re-invented to mean “My Entire Team Sucks.” Endless messages about love and sex shout out in spray paint or whisper from tiny scratchings. Friedlander, in a nearly-invisible style not unlike Walker Evans and Helen Levitt, tips his hat at human ingenuity of expression and our apparently insatiable need to communicate.

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This exhibition is presented on the occasion of the recently published book (D.A.P./ Distributed Arts Publishers, New York) of the same title. Letters from the People has been recently exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal and at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Lee Friedlander is the recipient of countless awards and grants including a MacArthur fellowship (1990) and the MacDowell Colony Award (1986). His work is widely exhibited and published including most recently The Jazz People of New Orleans, Like a One-Eyed Cat, and Maria.

This exhibition is concurrent with Helen Levitt: In the Street

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Unquestionably one of the master photographers of the urban 1930s, Levitt thrived amongst the imaginative realm of children. With a hand-held camera, often fitted with a right-angle viewfinder which allowed her to capture her subjects unaware and unguarded, Levitt documented the theater of daily life on the streets of New York. Lesser known yet of equal originality are her ambitions and experimental studies of graffiti. The current exhibition is the first solely devoted to this aspect of Levitt’s work.

Timeless in certain respects, Levitt’s perspective on the fugitive missives of young correspondents portrays both the universal time of childhood, and the geologic time of Lower Manhattan in the 1930s and 40s. Levitt, in her uniquely transparent and self-effacing method, documents the ingenuity and creativeness of children forever tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell: “I am a killer” scratched across wood planks; “A Detective Lives Here” divulged across cement steps; a caricature of a person thinking hieroglyphically: “5¢ for an ice cream soda.”

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Levitt is a recipient of three Guggenheim fellowships and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. her work has been exhibited internationally, including most recently as a traveling retrospective co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Monographs of her work include A Way of Seeing (Duke University Press) now in its fourth printing and In the Street (Duke University Press).

This exhibition is concurrent with Lee Friedlander: Letters from the People.

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Since the late 1970’s, Sugimoto’s Theater interiors have concentrated on the concept of time. Photographing within the large movie palaces built during the 1920s and 1930s Sugimoto places his 8×10” view camera at the most distant central spot of each theatre. Opening his shutter as each film begins, and closing it at the final credits, Sugimoto captures the accumulated light in a sublime rectangle of white light. The ornate fantasy architecture and the empty, radiant screens are metaphors for a dream-like state, akin to starting a fire.

The most recent work investigates such Bay Area cinematic monuments as the Castro, the Alhambra, the Grand Lake and the newly refurbished Stanford Theatre. The Los Angeles theatres are well represented by such majestic examples as El Capitan, the Metropolitan and the most modern: the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.

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New in his work is the series of Drive-in Movie Theatres. This work was inspired while working here in The Bay Area last year. Between movies, Sugimoto was driving in Los Altos when he happened across a Drive-in theatre at night. Intrigued by the possibilities, and the randomness of star trails and flight patterns, Sugimoto positioned himself under the night sky. The resulting images replace the architectural detailing of interiors with a spare, monolithic presence. With its minimal elements this series relates to the light experiments of James Turrell as well as Sugimoto’s own images of seas and oceans.

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A group of fifteen photograms will debut alongside Fuss’s series of Sunflowers. Fuss continues to explore metaphorically the issues of death and life, beauty and decay. Ranging in size from 11×14 inches to more than five feet in height, the photograms visually fall into a strange netherworld of description somewhere between realism and abstraction.

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Adam Fuss has exhibited internationally, and his work has been the subject of recent articles in Artforum and Aperture magazines. His photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art among other public institutions.

This exhibition is concurrent with Robert Adams: Early Works, 1968-1974

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On exhibit will be approximately twenty-two early works by Robert Adams made during the years 1968 to 1974. It was during this period that Adams published the two books that first established his reputation and brought his work to public acclaim, Denver and The New West. The photographs published in these two books have had an enormous influence on a subsequent generation of photographers.

Born in New Jersey in 1937, Adams has spent most of his adult life in the western United States recording in photographs the changing appearance as well as the enduring qualities of the landscape. During the 1960s he set out to document the American West, creating what are considered some of the most demanding and eloquent photographs ever made in this country. In his photographs the evidence of man can be found in the pervasive tract housing, the commercial strips that blanket the land, the unnecessary refuse of daily life. To all of his images Adams brings a formality and reserve. Hauntingly beautiful and often troubling, Adams’ images illustrate the confrontation between cultural remembrances of the ideal landscape and the realities of suburban expansion. It is here in these lost scenes, that he discovers an unorthodox and persistent beauty.

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Robert Adams has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and two Photographers’ Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work appears in numerous books and monographs included To Make It Home (Aperture, 1989). His work was recently the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This exhibition is concurrent with Adam Fuss: Photograms.

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