Penn’s subjects constituted a wide spectrum of writers, dancers, artists, socialites, musicians, political figures and other celebrities of the era. Among those who found their way into Penn’s corner were Noel Coward, the Duchess of Windsor, Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, the Gish Sisters, Duke Ellington, and Truman Capote.

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Penn had already begun to use the studio as an insistent environment in which the viewer is allowed to see the electrical cables, edges of backdrops, and the photographic detritus randomly scattered along the floor. This particular series, however, utilized the ruse of a sharper-than-90º corner in which the subjects position themselves. Some are wedged in as if suspended by their shoulders, others lean against it for compatible support, compressed and altered by the claustrophobic space. These are existential pictures; pictures in which “personalities” are isolated, posed in an abstract and artificial corner of the world. The pictures limn the unique and historic time in which they were made; the 1940s was a time of violent change and new beginnings, in which these daring intellects and talents thrived.

Irving Penn began his career in New York as a graphic artist in 1938, at age 17. After a year spent painting in Mexico he returned to New York City and began work at Vogue magazine where Alexander Liberman was art director. Penn’s photographs are included in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. The publication of his most recent monograph, Passage (1991, Callaway), coincides with the current exhibition.

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Diane Arbus was a singular and explosive force in photography, reshaping both the way pictures are made and our response to them. Her unrelentingly direct photographs of people who live on the edge of social acceptance, as well as those photographs depicting supposedly “normal” people in a way that sharply outlines the cracks in their public masks, were controversial at the time of their creation and remain so today. Her subjects are poignant in their willingness to reveal themselves to the camera. John Szarkowski, former Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York has written:

In addition to some of the well known images in the exhibition (Two Ladies at the Automat, Puerto Rican Woman with Beauty mark) a number of previously unexhibitied photographs will be included. This latter group will include several virtually unknown images from Arbus’ early 35mm work, as well as later images including Three Circus Ballerinas, Waitress at a nudist camp, and Bishop by the Sea.

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The exhibition will also include pictures from the Unititled series, work made in the last years of her life (1970 and 1971) at a home for retarded adults. In these images Arbus explored human limits and questions of identity and truth, which culminated her fifteen years as a photographer.

Arbus was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 and was included with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the now-legendary exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A major retrospective at MOMA was mounted in 1972, one year after her death.

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The exhibition, comprised of approximately thirty prints, includes Gutmann icons (e.g. Elevator Garage, Chicago [1936], and The Artist Lives Dangerously [1938]) as well as previously unpublished and unexhibited images. In many cases the negatives for these images have been lost or destroyed. Prints in the exhibition date from 1934, the year after Gutmann left Germany and settled in San Francisco, to 1945 when the photographer worked in China.

Born in Germany and trained as a painter, Gutmann took up photography shortly before he arrived in the United States in 1933. With a European’s cultural background, and an eye trained in the German avant-garde aesthetic, Gutmann observed aspects of American culture that eluded that of Americans themselves. Though Edward Weston was the acknowledged master in California at the time Gutmann made these photographs, Gutmann’s work was not self-consciously aesthetic like Weston’s and other of the f/64 group; rather, it is ironic, ethnographic, and often ambiguous. Though full of social observation, it is motivated not by a desire to reform or change, but only to observe.

Gutmann has been the subject of a number of important museum exhibitions internationally, as well as a recipient of a 1977 Guggenheim fellowship.

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The installation at Fraenkel Gallery has been designed by the Bechers specifically for the new gallery space and draws from their widely praised exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, which closed on June 21. For both exhibitions the Bechers have chosen to present their work as single images, encouraging the viewer to consider their photographs as independent entities rather than the typologies for which they were first recognized. Included in the exhibition are photographs of water towers, cooling towers, gas tanks, grain elevators, and blast furnaces. Taken in overcast skies or in the hazy sunlight of industrial zones, these seemingly artless photographs belie the elaborate processes and decisions involved in creating them — elevating the camera on scaffolds or ladders, waiting for clouds to block the sun, enlisting the cooperation of plant foremen and security guards to remove all signs of human life from the scene.

After twelve years and 110 exhibitions at 55 Grant Avenue, Fraenkel Gallery has moved to expanded quarters at 49 Geary Street. The new gallery was designed by C. David Robinson & Associates, whose principal, David Robinson, designed the interiors of the Friends of Photography/Ansel Adams Center and the recently completed the San Jose Museum of Art.

This exhibition is in association with Introductions 1991 sponsored by the San Francisco Art Dealers Association.

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Witkin’s subjects are frequently from the darker side of the real world. Freaks, transsexuals, dwarfs, fetuses, cadavers and laboratory animals form the basis of Witkin’s work. The photographs in this exhibition have been completed over the past two years, since the publication of Gods of Earth and Heaven (Twelvetrees Press).

The current exhibition includes a photograph of an elaborate fabrication entitled Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris, 1990, in which Witkin makes illustrated references to various French painters and photographers of the last century. In another, Witkin pictorialized the myth of of “Daphne and Apollo” by a photographic hybrid that combines Bruegel, Bosch and Durer in a some lucid interpretation of Yeats’ “terrible beauty.”

In addition to Witkin’s atypical subject matter, he also processes his prints untraditionally. Scratching and drawing on the negatives, Witkin then prints through a tissue, selectively toning and bleaching the final prints, thus producing seductive images of heightened “object quality.” This welding of the image and layering of historical and religious themes lures the viewer into the picture, only to be abruptly drawn back into the reality of the present and of the real-photographic image.

Witkin’s work raises questions and comments upon many issues of contemporary culture, while at the same time challenging our ideas about the nature of the photographic medium itself.

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The book’s tritone reproductions are distinguished by state-of-the-art printing supervised by Richard Benson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on photographic printmaking and reproduction. Nineteen inks were used in order to approximate the various photographic processes (daguerreotype, salt prints, albumen prints, platinum prints, gelatin-silver prints, etc.) as closely as possible. The book includes an essay by Eugenia Parry Janis, Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico.

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Printed as 40×50” color photographs, these images virtually explode with social commentary. The exhibition includes an advertisement for Sassoon hair products featuring Andy Warhol with his eye socket and half his face bullet-riddled. Several pictures of women, one of an illustration of a Mulatto woman, document an eerie and poignant misogyny incarnate, while other pictures of abstract text layered upon abstract text create some strange postmodern pentimento.

Considered one of the most significant and influential photographers working in color, Misrach in his recent work evidences an extraordinary sensitivity to light and its atmospheric effects on the land. His use of the cumbersome 8×10” view camera fills the photographs with dense and rewarding detail. Misrach has received numerous fellowships and awards including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973, 1977, 1984), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the International Center for Photography Award for outstanding publication (Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press). Misrach’s most recent book which has just been completed this month is entitled Bravo 20 (Johns Hopkins University Press) which documents illegal test sites of high-explosive bombs on public land near Fallon, Nevada. He has recently been awarded the prestigious Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.

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