Search results for ""Author Jeffrey Fraenkel""

"Humans, unlike other living creatures, want to make and look at pictures. So begins the introduction to the jaw-dropping array of photographs in Long Story Short, the latest in Fraenkel Gallery's idiosyncratic surveys of photography since the medium's invention 180 years ago.A surprising and unconventional slice of photography's history, Long Story Short is also an abbreviated tour of Fraenkel Gallery's approach to photography. Published to mark the gallery's 40th (and still counting) year, this sumptuously designed and printed volume presents work by photography's masters alongside that of little-known artists and anonymous thrift shop finds.Among the images to be discovered here are Eadweard Muybridge's 1887 study of a contortionist performing extreme body movements; Man Ray's 1923 ghost-like rayograph of an irradiated banjo; and a female impersonator applying her lipstick backstage, as seen by Diane Arbus in 1959.Interwoven among these are anonymous photographs of a tornado touching ground near Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts in 1896; astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing beside an American flag on the moon in 1969; and a lawnmower flying inexplicably over a meadow in 1974. Presented in approximate chronological order, the unconventional flow of images conveys a profound sense of photography's infinite riches, and is a meditation on the inexhaustible possibilities of the medium itself.

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American photographer Nicholas Nixon (born 1947) is best known for The Brown Sisters, his ongoing series of annual portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters (recently exhibited and published by The Museum of Modern Art). But Nixon's wider oeuvre has been less well documented. Long overdue, Nicholas Nixon: About Forty Years will be the first publication to focus on the broader swath of Nixon's more than 40-year career. In a published statement about photography written in 1975, Nixon remarked, "The world is infinitely more interesting than any of my opinions about it." To present the world as he sees it--in fascinating, precise and often startling detail--Nixon has consistently used unwieldy large-format cameras, with negatives measuring 8 x 10 inches or 11 x 14 inches. His recurring subjects--cities seen from above, people on their porches, landscapes, portraits of the very young and the very old--are woven together throughout his career like the cords of a cable. Nixon's large-format black-and-white photography is simultaneously intimate, technically precise and somehow relaxed. Beautifully designed and with exquisitely reproduced images, About Forty Years presents the most thorough view yet of this important artist's career.

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