Search results for ""fraenkel gallery,us""

The world in a front yard: Robert Adams records the seasonal shifts and transformations of the near and the intimate For much of his long career, Robert Adams (born 1937) has photographed the regions where he has lived, recording the transformation of the Western landscape into suburbs in Colorado, or documenting the destruction left in the wake of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. In recent years his focus has often turned to more intimate landscapes, as he has depicted the area around his home near the Oregon coast, where he has lived for more than 20 years. Standing Still celebrates a small front yard—its verdancy, and the changing light and seasons throughout the year. The black-and-white photographs record a lawn and its border of shrubs and small trees; a stone bird bath, deer and Adams' wife, Kerstin. They show a landscape immersed in fog and dusted with snow, or bathed in warm sunlight. In this quiet place, “each day can be the first day,” writes Adams.

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A major new work, Tenancy is comprised of 42 photographs by Robert Adams (born 1937) made in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, between 2013 and 2015, with short texts by the artist. The book’s theme of tenancy expresses the idea of “temporary possession of what belongs to another”—specifically, the natural environment. Adams’ recent photographs of the landscape reference the current and imminent threats of clearcutting, environmental degradation and natural disasters along the Northwestern coast of the US. The black-and-white photographs include poignant images of massive tree stumps on the beach—a product of the cutting of first and early second growth—as well as shimmering stretches of coastline protected for endangered birds previously thought to have abandoned northern Oregon.

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A legendary musician’s intimate vision of a great photographer’s profound, exquisitely somber oeuvre Bringing together the sensibilities of two remarkable artists, Peter Hujar Curated by Elton John provides striking proof of how one artist’s eye can shed light on another. Though known worldwide as one of the most revered performers of our era, Elton John is also a seasoned collector of photographs, with an acute and personal understanding of Hujar’s achievement. Through a selection of 50 photographs, the book presents a wide-ranging survey of Hujar's career. John writes: “Hujar's humanity, depth and sensual insights aren't for everyone, and don't need to be, but once his pictures get into your bloodstream they are impossible to shake.” The publication includes works spanning nearly two decades, featuring portraits of Hujar's eclectic circle of friends, his landmark nudes, atmospheric landscapes, portraits of performers (Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee and Edgar Winter) and a moving image of the artist with his mother. Peter Hujar (1934–87) was born in Trenton, New Jersey and moved to Manhattan to work in the magazine, advertising and fashion industries. He documented the vibrant cultural scene in downtown New York throughout the 1970s and 1980s, photographing artists, musicians, writers and performers. Hujar died of AIDS in 1987. Elton John (born 1947) is one of the most enduringly successful solo artists of all time. In 1992 he founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which funds programs to end the AIDS epidemic. Since the 1990s he has avidly collected photography. In 2016, Tate Modern organized the exhibition The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection.

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Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlander’s portrait of words in the world For more than five decades, Lee Friedlander has repeatedly been drawn to the signs that inscribe the American landscape, from hand-lettered ads to storefront windows to massive billboards. Incorporating these markings with precision and sly humor, Friedlander’s photographs record a kind of found poetry of desire and commerce. Focusing on one of the artist’s key motifs, Lee Friedlander: Signs presents a cacophony of wheat-paste posters, Coca-Cola ads, prices for milk, road signs, stop signs, neon lights, movie marquees and graffiti. The book collects 144 photographs made in New York and other places across the US, and features self-portraits, street photographs and work from series including The American Monument and America by Car, among others. Illegible or plainspoken, crude or whimsical, Friedlander’s signs are an unselfconscious portrait of modern life. Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his many monographs are Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work, among others. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski. Among the most important living photographers, Friedlander is in the collections of museums around the world.

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"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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A meditative portrayal of land and sea along an Oregon trail, from the leading figure of the New Topographics For more than 50 years, ever since his landmark photobook The New West, Robert Adams (born 1937) has numbered among America’s foremost modern photographers and chroniclers. Here, he returns to the landscape near his home on the Oregon coast, presenting photographs largely made on Nehalem Spit, a four-mile stretch of sand, seagrass and pines that divides the Pacific Ocean from Nehalem Bay. Recording changing light on the land and the sea, the black-and-white photographs, made between 2008 and 2019, and beautifully reproduced in this large-format volume, suggest questions to which Adams has often returned, about the meaning of our relationship to nature, and the precarity and brevity of our place in it.

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