Books published by Fraenkel Gallery,US

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.

The latest in a series of idiosyncratic surveys of the history of photography"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 ghostlike 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 lawn mower 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.

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.