Fraenkel Gallery,US – förlag

Twenty-two new painted woodblocks from photographer Adams' recent print series on the landscapes of his childhoodDuring the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic, Robert Adams (born 1937) noticed the subtle markings on a small plank of wood, detecting the form of a landscape within its grain. Long celebrated as a photographer, Adams began working with wooden scraps and block-printing ink, creating pieces that allude to the quiet forms of the Coloradan prairies, where he spent time in his youth. Created using tools he inherited from his father and grandfather, and often highlighting the natural grain of the wood, the painted woodblocks are modest in size and painted in springlike hues. Following the 2022 publication of The Plains, From Memory, this book brings together 22 new works, which often feature a bright horizon formed by blue sky and green grass populated by simple painted forms. The woodblock paintings depict idyllic pastoral motifs such as sunflowers, a road stretching into the distance and towering clouds.

A legendary musician’s intimate vision of a great photographer’s profound, exquisitely somber oeuvreBringing 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.

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.

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.

"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.

The world in a front yard: Robert Adams records the seasonal shifts and transformations of the near and the intimateFor 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.

A slender meditation on nature's ceaseless indifference to human affairs, as expressed through 10 gleaming photographs of the skiesFor more than 50 years, the legendary American photographer Robert Adams (born 1937) has made black-and-white photographs documenting the imprint of human development on the landscape of the American West. His austere, rigorously composed photographs capture with unflinching precision both the beauty of nature and the exploitation and degradation man has subjected it to. In Along the Canadian Border, Adams obliquely addresses our fraught societal moment, alluding to the distance between brutal political forces and policies and the resilience of the natural world. Turning his camera to the sky, he presents 10 luminous photographs of clouds, each indifferent to human boundaries and conflicts. Adams borrows the title of the book from a poem by William Stafford, who writes that, in the face of strife and pomp, "the only heroic thing is the sky."

A compendium of never-before-published contact sheets from the iconic documentarian of the American West, spanning decades and formats, replete with his red-marker frame selections and handwritten notes Robert Adams’ photographs of the Western landscape are iconic reminders of nature’s resilience in the face of human development. But as this collection of never-before-published contact sheets shows, his precise arrangements of clouds, trees and roads under clear Colorado light were not inevitable. Instead, they are the result of Adams’ relentless searching for form and his inimitable, exacting photographic technique, as evidenced by prints marked with cropping lines, exposure times and other notes. The book pairs around 50 photographs with their original contact sheets, each showing the exposures from a single roll of medium format film, or with contact-printed 4x5 negatives and pencil-drawn printing guides. The photographs span 20 years, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, just before Adams traded these larger negatives for a nimbler 35mm camera. Artifacts from an age when every serious photograph was a handmade object, the contact sheets offer a graphic record of what Adams was seeking, and what he set aside. As Jeffrey Fraenkel writes in his introduction, Adams’ contact sheets “remind us [Adams] was never looking for the perfect picture. He looked until the picture became one.”Robert Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. He became a photographer in the mid-1960s and has published more than 40 books of photographs, with the changing landscape of the American West as his primary subject. His books include The New West (1974), Los Angeles Spring (1986), Listening to the River (1994), Turning Back (2005), Tenancy (2017) and Thalia (2024). Adams lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.

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.

Lee Friedlander is one of the few artists in any medium to have sustained a body of influential work over five decades. To make the photographs in Mannequin, he returned to the hand-held, 35-mm camera that he used in the earliest decades of his career. Over the past three years, Friedlander has roamed the sidewalks of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, focusing on storefront windows and reflections that conjure marketplace notions of sex, fashion and consumerism, while recalling Atget’s surreal photographs of Parisian windows made 100 years earlier. Thoroughly straightforward, their unsettling and radical new compositions suggest photographs that have been torn up and pasted back together again in near-random ways.Lee Friedlander (born 1934) first came to public attention in the landmark exhibition New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1967. The range of his work since then—including portraits, nudes, still lifes and studies of people at work—is anchored in a uniquely vivid and far-reaching vision of the american scene. More than 40 books about his work have been published since the early 1970s, including Self-Portrait, Sticks and Stones, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan, Family, America by Car, People at Work and The New Cars 1964. His career was the focus of a major traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work can be found in depth in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.

An artist’s book placing photographs of distant figures in conversation with photographs taken concurrently by the photograph’s subjectsIn the early 2000s, Richard Misrach (born 1949) began a series titled On the Beach, a body of work that traveled extensively and has been highly influential. These color photographs deal with the human figure seen at a distance, on an unspecified beach or in the water, observed from an unsettling and difficult-to-identify point of view located high above. Misrach has continued this work, while vast changes in photographic technology over the intervening decade have caused a shift in approach, both conceptually and technically. Untitled is an artist book based on two photographs: the one made by Misrach and the other made concurrently, at the time of exposure, by the subjects of his photograph. The extreme detail explored in this work concisely summates both the artist’s concerns and the ubiquity of digital technology as we are portrayed and portray ourselves.

"I found it a daunting task to choose just a few images from Lee Friedlander's vast career. Where to start...?" –Joel CoenIn his selection of 70 photographs by Lee Friedlander, acclaimed filmmaker Joel Coen focuses on Friedlander’s beautifully strange sense of composition, in which images are off kilter and visually dense, bisected and carved by stop signs and utility poles, store windows and reflections, car doors and windshields or shadows and trees. "As a filmmaker, I liked the idea of creating a sequence that would highlight Lee’s unusual approach to framing—his splitting, splintering, repeating, fracturing and reassembling elements into new and impossible compositions," Coen writes. Featuring work spanning more than 60 years, the book includes selections from some of Friedlander’s most celebrated series, including The American Monument, America by Car, The Little Screens and others, arranged to draw connections between form and composition rather than subject. In an afterword, renowned actor Frances McDormand describes the bond between the two artists: "they both capture and fill frames with sometimes simple and other times chaotically elaborate images that cause us all to wonder."Lee Friedlander (born 1934) began photographing in 1948. Among his more than 50 monographs are Signs, Sticks and Stones, Self-Portrait, Letters from the People, Cherry Blossom Time in Japan and At Work. His work was included in the influential 1967 exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by John Szarkowski.Joel Coen (born 1954) is an American filmmaker who, with his younger brother Ethan, has directed films such as Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and Hail Caesar.

A Road Through Shore Pine focuses on a series of 18 photographs by Robert Adams (born 1937), taken in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in fall 2013. Adams documents a contemplative journey, made first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. The passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life's most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Adams writes of these photographs: "The road is one that my family traveled often and fondly. Many of its members are gone now, and Kerstin and I visit the road for the example of the trees." Adams had stored this work in an archival print box on which he inscribed in pencil a line from the journal of the Greek poet George Seferis: "A marvelous road, enough to make you weep; pine trees, pine trees…."

Silent Dialogues, by art historian Alexander Nemerov, is a probing, intimate reflection about photographer Diane Arbus, the author's aunt, and her brother, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Howard Nemerov, the author's father. "I have no memories of Diane Arbus," begins Alexander Nemerov in the first of two meditative essays that comprise this book. "A Resemblance" examines Howard Nemerov's complicated responses to his sister's photography. "The School" focuses on a body of Arbus' work known as the Untitled series, photographs made at residences for the mentally disabled between 1969 and 1971, in the last years of her life. Through their work, the author explores the siblings' disparate and distinct sensibilities, and in doing so uncovers signs of an unexpected aesthetic kinship. Illustrations complementing the essays include numerous examples of Arbus' photographs; paintings by artists as diverse as Pieter Brueghel, Norman Rockwell, Paul Feeley and Johannes Vermeer; and a selection of poems by Howard Nemerov, chosen by his son.

Meatyard as self-taught visionary: a portrait of the photographer by acclaimed art historian Alexander NemerovThe legendary, mysterious photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) lived in Lexington, Kentucky, working in a close-knit community of artists and writers while making his living as an optician. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Mystic, by esteemed art historian Alexander Nemerov, is a groundbreaking study of Meatyard’s work, creative thinking and sources of inspiration.Given rare access to the personal library in which Meatyard had tellingly annotated works of fiction, poetry and other pages of personal significance, Nemerov examines the artist’s process of creating characters and staging dreamlike scenes. American Mystic also considers the artists and writers whose work influenced Meatyard, such as William Blake, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Merton.Meatyard’s celebrated series The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater and many of his other photographs cast family members and friends in central roles, often masked and enacting symbolic dramas. Of these mystical works, Nemerov writes, “For Meatyard, a photograph is a careful or casual arrangement meant to produce a feeling it cannot name.”

The road has been a central motif in the work of Robert Adams (born 1937) since the beginnings of his life as a photographer in the late 1960s. 27 Roads is the first publication to focus on this important aspect of his work, and is comprised of the artist's concise, poetic selection of images spanning almost five decades. Whether fast concrete highways, quiet cuts through dark forests, paved commercial strips or dusty tracks on a clear-cut mountainside, Adams' roads function as metaphors for solitude, connection or freedom. Adams writes, "Roads can still be beautiful. Occasionally they appear like a perfect knife slicing through a perfect apple, the better to show that two halves are one." Robert Adams has been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation fellowships, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. His work was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Yale University Art Gallery, which toured internationally from 2011 to 2014.

Traffic signs, sandwich boards and posters: Friedlander’s portrait of words in the worldFor 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.

A sumptuous clothbound collection of work by British photographer Richard Learoyd, famed for his luminous camera obscura portraitsBringing together more than 70 photographs from the past ten years, this luxurious volume includes Learoyd's (born 1966) widely acclaimed portraits of clothed or nude models, made with the massive camera obscura that he built in his studio, which produces one-of-a-kind color photographs. Sandra S. Phillips writes of these portraits: "There is something incontrovertibly present in the people he photographs; they are more alive, more beautiful, and more fallible—even more vulnerable—than the people we see in most pictures.Also featured are landscapes made in California, England and Spain, as well as still lifes of animals and flowers. Presenting the highlights of Learoyd's career, and organized in reverse chronological order, this volume shows how Learoyd's images are rooted in the history of art, but were made with the intention of challenging the authority of painting.