Beginning with several daguerreotypes from the 1840s, the exhibition traces a development of photographic processes and aesthetics through the next 140 years. Included are several early albumen prints from Great Britain, France, and China, an interior view of the Emporium department store after the 1906 earthquake, two anonymous images made by Bauhaus photographers in the 1930’s, a picture of “Herschel Bernardi’s brother” at his desk, and a Chinese color film still from the 1950’s among others. Several of the photographs have been loaned from the private collections across the United States. Ultimately, the exhibition provides an opportunity for the serious viewer to reflect on the nature of “the photographic,” and on photography itself.

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For the past five years Misrach’s work has focused on the desert of the Coachella Valley in Southern California. In the course of this portrait of the desert, several distinct concerns have emerged, especially the fires that ravage the landscape daily, and the floods that have created the vast area known as the Salton Sea. Though these subjects are usually considered the domain of journalism, Misrach’s photographs clearly recognize a larger metaphorical significance in these subjects.

Considered one of the most influential photographers working in color, Misrach’s new work evidences an extraordinary sensitivity to light and its atmospheric effects on the land. His use of the cumbersome 8”x10” view camera fills the photographs with dense and rewarding detail. Misrach is the recipient of three NEA and one Guggenheim fellowship. “Scenes of the American Desert” will be published as a monograph in 1986 by University of New Mexico Press.

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Close Gallery

Chuck Close is best known as an artist for his larger-than-life portraits carefully derived from photographs. In these large-scale photographs, Close enlarges his nude subject matter to nearly billboard proportions, thus examining, and encouraging to examine, the devices by which pictorial illusion operate. Fundamentally a conceptualist, Close enlarges our perspective, in every sense of the word, going beyond the confusing complications of narrative, of history, of politics, and addresses the Modernist ideal of immediate, essential experience.

The exhibition is part of “INTRODUCTIONS 1985”, which is being sponsored by the San Francisco Art Dealers Association.

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While Mapplethorpe’s work has always exploited the beauty of the black and white print, it is only in the last year that he has turned to the platinum printing process for his imagery. Because of the uniquely wide tonal range that can be achieved through the platinum process, this method is particularly well suited to the photographer’s keen sensitivity to tonal values. The photographs are exhibited in special laminate frames designed by the artist.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are internationally recognized and widely published. His forthcoming book, “Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits” will be published this summer by Twelvetrees Press.

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The is the first exhibition of Robert Adams’s “Summer Nights” series which is to be published by Aperture in September 1985. The intimate black and white photographs made at night in suburban and rural Colorado are not pictures that reveal their meaning to the casual viewer. Adams’s photographs force one to pay attention to small details, to focus on the subtle beauty of the urban environment and to almost hear the stillness of a summer night. We are asked to look with a fresh vision at that which is common –the quiet suburban street, the house with a single light, the lamp post in a field, the pick-up truck, and the ferris wheel glowing in the heat of early evening. Like a poem, Adams’s sequence of photographs brings new and unusual meaning to the world around us.

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Diane Arbus was a singular and explosive force in photography, reshaping both the ways pictures are made and our response to them. The 1972 Aperture monograph, Diane Arbus, one of the most popular photography books ever published, presented the unusual characters—transvestites, retarded adults, carnival performers—for which she is so well known. Diane Arbus: Portraits on Assignment presents Arbus’s commercial photographs made for the most glamorous and innovative publications of the Sixties.

Arbus entered the magazine business during a period of intense experimentation and opportunity. Joining the ranks of Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Irving Penn, who found in magazines a means of earning a living in the days when art photography was still a questionable proposition, Arbus worked for eleven years creating photographs of astonishing originality for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, he London Sunday Times Magazine, and many others. Her assignments covered the luminaries of literature, theater, film, fashion, show business, and high society. The exhibition includes portraits of Charles Atlas, Mae West, James Brown, Marcello Mastroianni and Norman Mailer, who once commented: “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”

Diane Arbus: Portraits on Assignment is a collective portrait of sixties’ style and culture. It reveals an artist who posed no artificial boundary between art and the paying job, and who chose, regardless of the outlet, to put her own uncompromising, indelible stamp on our visual imagination.

The nationally touring exhibition Diane Arbus: Magazine Work will be on view at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach from January 29 to February 24, 1985.

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