-
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to take part in Art Basel Online and present this extended selection in our online viewing room.
The gallery exhibits work by Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Elisheva Biernoff, Sophie Calle, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Christian Marclay, Wardell Milan, and others.
-
ANDY WARHOL AND THE MEMBERS OF THE FACTORY, 1969
In 1969, Richard Avedon began using an eight-by-ten inch view camera on a tripod in order to yield images with extreme detail. That same year, he set out to photograph one of his most ambitious portraits of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory. With this narrative group portrait, Avedon portrayed the complex dynamics at the core of the sexual revolution, one of the major cultural movements of the late 1960s.
“In 1969 Avedon began using an eight-by-ten-inch Deardorff view camera on a tripod—a cumbersome and demanding piece of equipment that brought with it a new way of working and a new set of constraints. Rather than moving with the Rolleiflex at his waist, he was now standing beside a large box with a static lens. No longer a mobile extension of the eye, the camera became a silent witness to the concentrated face-off between photographer and subject…
Using the Deardorff, Avedon generally poses his subjects against a plain white seamless backdrop, illuminated by shadowless, diffuse sunlight or by a similar kind of flat, studio lighting. Because the camera's shutter speed is slow and the depth-of-field is shallow, the subject cannot move much without throwing something out of focus. Because of the tight framing and Avedon's commitment to using the entire, uncropped sheet—black borders and all—the subject cannot shift or slump, and must remain attentive and finely attuned to the discipline of the process. There are no props; there is nothing to lean on or hide behind. "I've worked out of a series of no's," Avedon explains. "No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the 'yes.' I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us." With everything inessential stripped away, what remains is a pure opportunity for engagement, ranging from close connection to a more reserved confrontation, with innumerable feints, detours, dead ends, and digressions in between. Finally an endgame is reached when the more practiced player, having scrutinized every move and countermove, knows he has arrived at the win-all exposure…
Working in his most directorial mode [for Andy Warhol and members of The Factory], the photographer began with all his actors jumbled together in a single frame. Gradually, as he moved them around, he found he needed to expand the space. He broke the group into smaller clumps, isolating and highlighting certain figures, and the Factory spread out in a lateral frieze… Exquisitely attentive to every detail of the interplay of figures and their graphic positions against the white ground, Avedon created a tour de force cycle laid out flat, as if the figures progressing around the belly of a Greek vase had paused for the photographer's camera before resuming their rounds.”
—Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman, Richard Avedon: Portraits (Harry N. Abrams, 2002)
-
-
- Jeffrey Fraenkel on Richard Avedon's "Andy Warhol and the Members of the Factory", 1969.
-
Richard Avedon, Self Portrait, New York City, May 31, 2002 © Richard Avedon Foundation
“An irrepressible innovator, Avedon has consistently defied conventional expectations about what a portrait is supposed to look like, always avoiding tired formulas—the writer in his book-lined study, the pianist at the baby grand—and offering instead a radically purified approach to the genre. By dint of progressive challenges to himself, he has not only distilled photographic portraiture to its irreducible core, but also has produced an extended meditation on life, death, art, and identity in the form of a vast collective portrait of America in the second half of the twentieth century.”
—Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman, Richard Avedon: Portraits (Harry N. Abrams, 2002)
-
Be a good boy and put this on., 2020
Wardell Milan works in mixed media, combining elements of photography, drawing, painting, and collage. Themes of freedom of expression and safe spaces are often at the forefront of his works, especially as they apply to the marginalized body. In this piece, Milan takes inspiration from Venice (where the image that acts as a canvas for the work was made), where he was struck by the romantic and sensual nature of the city. The photograph creates a safe haven for a romantic exchange between two figures. Milan’s work often incorporates and references photographic history, in this instance with photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and an homage to an Andres Serrano nude.
-
Two boys smoking in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1963
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.
-
A NAKED MAN BEING A WOMAN, N.Y.C., 1968
This rare print was made by Arbus herself, soon after she made the negative in 1968. More than five decades later it remains one of the most startling images of her career.
“Naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968, shows a man in what is most likely his own room—the trash under the bed, the discarded shoes, the hot plate. But he has parted the curtains to his bed as though revealing a mystery at once theatrical and divine, and poses with impenetrable self-consciousness, genitals concealed between his thighs as the Venus Anadyomene who sprang from the foam of the sea. Even his feet are placed like those in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Arbus’s flash accentuates the supple body, its extraordinary beauty, and the provocative pose with cocked hip—a gesture that also recalls antiquity and has long connoted sexual readiness. The man’s face, painted like that of a woman, is strangely remote. The precision and apparent artlessness of this picture is characteristic of Arbus’s later work...”
“Some of the change that occurred between Headless man, N.Y.C. 1961 and Naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968, can be attributed to a change in the materials and equipment Arbus chose to use. In 1962 she relinquished the 35mm Nikon SLR in favor of a 2 1/4 twin-lens reflex camera (she used a Rolleiflex and, later, a Mamiyaflex), which generates a larger negative and thus a sharper, more precise image. Arbus said that she changed cameras because she felt that the pictures produced with the 35mm camera were not particular enough...
The 2 1/4 camera lent itself to a more direct relationship with the subject of a picture. The Nikon can be passed to the eye in an easy, swift balletic movement that permits the photographer to seize a picture and disengage quickly from the subject... Such agility is really not possible with the bulkier and hence more obvious 2 1/4 camera, held at waist level where the photographer must still make the camera and look down into it. As a result, the making of the picture becomes a deliberate process that requires the subject’s cooperation and participation.”
—Sandra S. Phillips, in Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House, 2003)
-
Sandro Botticelli, 'Birth of Venus', ca. 1485, The Ufizzi, Florence, Italy.
"Even his feet are placed like those in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Arbus’ flash accentuates the supple body, its extraordinary beauty, and the provocative pose with cocked hip—a gesture that also recalls antiquity and has long connoted sexual readiness.”
—Sandra S. Phillips, Diane Arbus: Revelations (Random House, 2003)
-
SELF-PORTRAIT, RED, ZURICH, 2000
Self-portrait, Red, Zurich is one of the more direct and compelling self-portraits of Nan Goldin’s career. Against an engulfing darkness this out-of-focus image encapsulates one of Goldin’s driving creative endeavours: self-confrontation. With her characteristic rich colors, dark shadows, and lush textures, Goldin shares a deeply personal moment of contemplation, intimacy, and introspection.
-
Great Dane, 1981
“When looking at pictures of animals, it is easy to lapse into anthropomorphism, just as it is tempting to reduce them to single human traits (the silly goose, the frightened rabbit, the dogged dog). But Hujar manages to navigate us around these obstacles, and steer us toward the ultimate mystery of animal presence, that of being confronted with a consciousness that, as far as we can ascertain, is fundamentally different in character from our own, but that nevertheless evinces our empathy and our curiosity.”
—Chris Wiley, The New Yorker (2018)
-
Shiprock #4, Navajo Nation, New Mexico, 1998
“Titles can convey and release unexpected significance in an otherwise straightforward image. The remarkable land formation in this photograph is on Navajo land, and the title helps us consider that fact and all its implications. It shapes how we think of this image.”
—Richard Misrach
This previously unseen 1998 photograph is from Misrach’s decades-long series Desert Cantos. In this body of work Misrach explores themes of land ownership, human interference, and the conquering forces of nature. This photograph depicts Shiprock (or Tsé Bitʼaʼí in the Navajo language, meaning "rock with wings," or "winged rock,"), a monadnock on Navajo land. The formation is a sacred location for the Navajo people, and plays a strong role in their religion and legends.
-
Untitled #892-03, 2003
Employing a soaring vantage point, Richard Misrach depicts a tiny figure, engulfed by a seemingly endless stretch of beach. By placing this solitary figure in the context of the vast ocean, Misrach pits man against nature. This photograph underscores the delicacy and precariousness of humankind.
What quietly emerges from this image, despite the seemingly idyllic environment, is the subtle hint of potential foreboding. The intimation of danger in paradise is integral to the meaning of the photographs. The series—made over a five-year period—speaks to the sense of physical and psychological vulnerability that has pervaded American consciousness since 9/11. The sense of anxiety is also implicit in the title of the series, inspired by Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach in which the sole survivors of an atomic holocaust—stranded on an island in the Pacific—await the approaching nuclear clouds.
This photograph is the cover of Misrach’s acclaimed 2007 monograph, a message for our time that beauty is fragile and if we can, we should stop, savor it, and surrender.
- Daphne Palmer speaks about Richard Misrach's "Untitled #892-03" and his series 'On The Beach'.
-
Ripple, 2020
Biernoff's Ripple confounds the viewer in multiple ways. One might think they are looking at a photograph when this is in fact a meticulously rendered painting based on a photograph. What appears as ripples is an illusion referencing the less-than-perfect processing that befell the original photograph upon which this painting is based. The back of the original photograph, and hence also the back of the painting alludes to the ripples as heat waves but more likely it is due to inadequate photographic processing. It is all a stunning illusion.
-
Water Towers, 1968-1984
“By placing several cooling towers side by side something happened, something like tonal music; you don’t see what makes the objects different until you bring them together, so subtle are their differences.”
—Hilla Becher
The husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959. Their photographs of industrial structures documented the anonymous and often-disused manufacturing and domestic buildings they encountered in the abandoned wastelands of post-industrial Europe and the United States. Like technical drawings, their photographs preserve the “anonymous sculpture” of architectural forms. Water Towers, 1968-1984 is a six-part typology of industrial water towers taken during their travels in Germany, Great Britain, France and the United States.
“There is a wisdom and honour in the Bechers’ work which frees them from imposing a conditional reading upon the viewer. The wisdom is the methodology they recognise in the ‘neutral’ depiction of record photography. The honour stems from a principle about not imposing their ideas on other people... The photographs are portraits of our history. And when the structures have been demolished and grassed over, as though they were never there, the pictures remain.”
—Michael Collins, Tate Magazine (2004)
“We photographed water towers and furnaces because they are honest. They are functional, and they reflect what they do—that is what we liked. A person always is what s/he wants to be, never what s/he is. Even an animals usually plays a role in front of the camera.”
—Hilla Becher
- Frish Brandt discusses Bernd and Hilla Becher's typologies.
-
Untitled, 1999
“I work a lot in a territory which I feel is not invisible, but on the edge of perception.”
—Adam Fuss
Relying on the most primal infrastructure of photography and image making, Adam Fuss often works without a camera. Building his images with the basic ingredients of light and light-sensitive paper, he has made photographs of water, smoke, flowers, christening gowns, and birds in flight. In this work, he puts aside the ingredient of light and worked solely with mushroom spores, carefully placing mushroom caps directly on paper and allowing the dropped spores to leave their own direct mark.
-
Opticks 053, 2018
Over more than four decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has explored the ways photography can be used to record traces of invisible but elemental forces. His philosophical approach asks questions about the human experience of these phenomena.
Opticks is a new series of large-scale color photographs depicting the color of light Sugimoto observed through a prism in his Tokyo studio. Using Polaroid film, he recorded sections of the rainbow spectrum projected into a darkened chamber, paying particular attention to the spaces and gaps between hues. Opticks presents unique enlargements of these Polaroids.
Sugimoto describes his process: “Sunlight travels through black empty space, strikes and suffers my prism and refracts into an infinite continuum of colour. In order to view each hue more clearly, I devised a mirror with a special micro-adjusting tilting mechanism,” and projected the beam from the prism onto the mirror, he writes. “Of course, I could further split those prismatic colours by adjusting the angle of that long tall mirror so as to reflect only the hue I want. I could split red into an infinity of reds,” he explains.
Inspired by the writings and research of Sir Isaac Newton and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on the science and experience of light, the works in Opticks explore the infinite nature and dual status of color as a physical phenomena and an emotional force. Sugimoto titled Opticks after Newton’s 1704 book of the same name, which presented his groundbreaking experiments with prisms and light. More than 100 years later, in 1810, Goethe published Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), a study of the physical basis of colors and human responses to them, which found Newton’s “impersonal scientific exposition wanting on artistic grounds,” Sugimoto writes.
- Frish Brandt speaks about Hiroshi Sugimoto's newest series, 'Opticks'.
-
The making of ‘Opticks’, Hiroshi Sugimoto in his studio, Tokyo, photography by Yoshio Suzuki.
Looking at light through his own prism, Sugimoto notes:
"I too had my doubts about Newton's seven-colour spectrum: yes, I could see his red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet schema, but I could just as easily discern many more different colours in-between, nameless hues of red-to-orange and yellow-to-green. Why must science always cut up the whole into little pieces when it identifies specific attributes? The world is filled with countless colours, so why did natural science insist on just seven? I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolours. Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks, now that scientific knowledge no longer needs a God?"
-
LIDS AND STRAWS (One Minute), 2016
Lids and Straws assembles 60 photographs made by Marclay of these nominal subjects found on the streets of London. Played back at the speed of one image per second, the plastic objects rotate like the second hand of a clock and loop endlessly, referencing Marclay’s celebrated work, The Clock (2010), a 24-hour montage of film clips appropriated from cinematic history. The flickering images recall flip-books, early cinema, and animation devices of the late nineteenth century. Marclay’s animation sets the discarded trails of rubbish in motion, giving the humble objects new life and transforming his chance encounters with trash into visual poetry. The excerpt below shows fifteen of these images.
Christian Marclay routinely makes photographs during his daily walks through London, where he lives. By subtly editing many thousands of images of particular objects discarded on the pavement beneath his feet, Marclay has created a series of hypnotic animations that unlock new possibilities inherent in the concept of “street photography.”
-
Real estate sign. Dusk. Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1970
Over a career of more than five decades, Robert Adams has documented the extent and the limits of our damage to the American West, recording there, in over fifty books of pictures, reasons to hope. “The goal,” he has said, “is to face facts but to find a basis for hope. To try for alchemy.”.
-
North Pole, 2018
In Calle’s newest series Because, the artist presents her viewers with a photograph hidden behind a felt curtain. Embroidered on each curtain are Calle’s words describing her reasons for making the photograph the viewer is about to see. In presenting viewers with the text before the image, Calle upends the usual order in which images are read.
-
Becuase I am there, on the bridge
Because I am with Marie who doesn't take pictures
Because we are alone
Because that's what you do when you are at the ends of the earth
Because I won't be back to the North Pole anytime soon
Because I can't resist
Because of the silence
Because of the solemnity
Because of day when it is night
Because of the blue, the clear sky, the grey sea
Because it is the night of September 11
Because I want to believe in this image
Because you never know
For the memory of it
-
Newark, New Jersey, 1962
Since the early 1960s, Lee Friedlander has focused on the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Made in New York, San Francisco, and dozens of cities and small towns in between, Friedlander’s photographs record milk prices, cola ads, neon lights, road signs, graffiti, and movie marquees. Depicting these texts with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s approach to America transcribes a sort of found poetry of commerce and desire.
-
FLORIDA, 1963
“The pictures on these pages are in effect deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate. They are the work of Lee Friedlander, one of the most accomplished and sharp-minded of the younger American photographers….”
—Walker Evans,
Harper's Bazaar (1963)
This rare, early print is part of The Little Screens series, one of Friedlander’s most influential bodies of work. Made in the early 1960s, the images depict television screens (then a relatively recent luxury appliance) in lonely motel rooms and other anonymous spaces throughout the country. The luminous boxes transmit images of pop icons, political figures, and minor celebrities. The Little Screens document not only ghost-rooms filled with bland furnishings, they also reveal an emerging reality—the omnipresence of TV screens and the drone of television voices and personalities that fill space in an increasingly isolationist culture.
"It just so happens that the wan reflected light from home television boxes casts an unearthly pall over the quotidian objects and accouterments we all live with. This electronic pallor etiolates our bed boards and pincushions, our mute scratch pads and our inglorious pillboxes. It is a half-light we never notice, as though we were dumb struck by those very luminous screens we profess to disdain. That disdain is not much mitigated by Friedlander’s selective potshots. What are these faces that moon out from the screen? Taken out of context as they are here that baby might be selling skin rash, the careful, good-looking women might be categorically unselling marriage and the home and total daintness.”
—Walker Evans, Harper's Bazaar (1963)
-
ADELE BLOCH-BAUER I, 2016
Kota Ezawa’s work often references images from current events and art history in his multi-valenced oeuvre which includes prints, lightboxes, and videos. In Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Ezawa references the iconic Gustav Klimt painting that was stolen by the Nazi regime in 1938. Painstakingly recreated in two-dimensional shapes and color fields, the piece blurs the line between reality and fiction, and calls into question the dilemma of ownership of popular images.
-
Medallion, 1948
In Medallion, a doll’s disembodied head blends into the rough texture of a wooden floor or panel, its open eyes drawn over a layer of peeling paint. The photograph transforms a child’s toy into an emblem of some unknowable event or achievement, and speaks to Sommer’s longstanding interest in including found objects in surreal tableaux.
“Early in his artistic career, Sommer began collecting objects, many of which he found while frequenting local junkyards. Relying on chance, the artist went looking for the discarded treasures that he would then combine into compelling compositions and photograph. In 1950, Sommer commented: ‘Photography is well adapted to work by the laws of chance. Poetic and speculative photographs can result if one works carefully and accurately, yet letting chance relationships have full play.’ [1]
The whimsical, uncanny arrangements of small items that Sommer started to create around 1946.... echo similar practices by the Dadaists and surrealists, who also embraced chance in the 1920s and 1930s. While creating these works, however, Sommer also maintained his concern with pictorial logic and sought out elements that would look striking together in the fine gradations of grey tones he achieved in his meticulously crafted prints.”
[1] Quoted in Frederick Sommer, Philadelphia College of Art, p. 13.
—Ksenya Gurshtein, National Gallery of Art (2013)
-
Perfect Poppies, 2019
“The apparatus I use consists of a lens, some lights, and a processing machine. The process has certain built-in qualities to do with physics and optics, but the most important quality for me is that it is capable of producing photographs that fascinate me, that match my vision.”
—Richard Learoyd
Richard Learoyd’s color images are made with one of the most antiquarian of photographic processes: the camera obscura [“dark room” in Latin]. Learoyd has created a room-sized camera in which the photographic paper is exposed. The subject, whether person or still life, is in the adjacent room, separated by a lens. Light falling on the subject is directly focused onto the photographic paper without an interposing film negative. The result is an entirely grainless, unique image. Learoyd’s subjects, composed simply and directly, are described with the thinnest plane of focus, re-creating and exaggerating the way that the human eye perceives, with a tip of the hat to the Dutch Masters.
-
TATIANA RED DRESS, 2010
"A photograph should have the ability to communicate the sense of humanity, especially if it’s a picture of a person. It should have an internal narrative that allows you to walk away with a question or two in your mind. And I think those are the criteria that I use for my work.”
— Richard Learoyd
-
Southern Environs of Memphis, 1969-1970
"Often people ask what I'm photographing, which is a hard question to answer. And the best that I've come up with is I just say 'Life today.'"
—William Eggleston
“Think of it as a picture that describes boundaries: the boundary between the city and the country, civilization and wilderness, the fail-safe point between community and freedom, the frontier of restrained protest or cautious adventure...”
“And the boundary between the new and the old, the new neighborhood advancing into the old land, but the neighborhood itself not so new as last year, the house in the foreground no longer the last in the line, and the ‘56 Buick that stands by its doors already poised on the fulcrum of middle age, still well-shined and well-serviced, competent and presentable, but nevertheless no longer young. And the boundary that separates day from evening, the time of hard shadows and yellow heat from the cool blue opalescent dusk, the time of demarcation between the separate and public lives of the day and the private communal lives of evening, the point at which families begin to gather again beneath their atavistic roofs and the neighborhood sounds with women’s voices crying the names of children.”
—John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide (MoMA, 1976)
-
Bruce Nauman, New Mexico, 2018
Since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials, which coincided with the publication of his widely influential first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, Alec Soth has stood out as a vibrant and distinctive voice in contemporary photography. His iconic large-format color photographs of people and scenes from middle America have received critical acclaim. Rooted firmly in the narrative framework of traditional photographic expression, Soth has continued to push the boundaries of the medium through his long-term projects and his prolific book-publishing activities.
-
For any questions, please write to us at inquiries@fraenkelgallery.com or click below:
ART BASEL ONLINE 2020: ONLINE VIEWING ROOM
Past viewing_room