Fraenkel Gallery

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Fraenkel Gallery Contemporary art gallery focused on exploring photography and its relation to other media.⁣ Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The gallery represents the work of Robert Adams, Sophie Calle, Lee Friedlander, Adam Fuss, Nan Goldin, Katy Grannan, Richard Learoyd, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Alec Soth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and works closely with the estates of Diane Arbus, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Peter Hujar, and Garry Winogrand. In recent years, the gallery has expanded its roster to include multidisciplinary artists such as Elisheva Biernoff, Mel Bochner, Kota Ezawa, Martine Gutierrez, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Christian Marclay, Wardell Milan, Richard T. While photography has been a consistent through-line of our exhibitions and more than 70 publications, it is far from the whole story. Many exhibitions have featured artists whose work is not strictly, or not at all, photographic: Mel Bochner, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Agnes Martin, and Sol LeWitt among others. Fraenkel Gallery maintains long-established relationships with museums, private collectors, and corporations around the world, and welcomes the experienced collector as well as those just beginning.

“Often when making photographs, I strive to become invisible to allow the work to have its own life separate from me. I ...
10/18/2026

“Often when making photographs, I strive to become invisible to allow the work to have its own life separate from me. I try to give room for the work to breathe, to exist alone and show its own unique presence.”
—Richard Learoyd

📸 Photograph by "Untitled Fragment 202" (2021), unique camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph, 24 x 24 inches (image, sheet & mount) [61 x 61 cm]

There's just one week left to see Lee Friedlander: Maria in our gallery. The last day to see the show is Saturday, Octob...
10/17/2026

There's just one week left to see Lee Friedlander: Maria in our gallery. The last day to see the show is Saturday, October 24. 🌹

In a review in Aperture, Piper French notes that the images are “clearly ‘Friedlanders,’” made with the artist’s familiar formal rigor. At the same time, they are also “more intimate than much of Lee’s work.” Balanced between these forces, Maria is not quite a muse, but the portraits demonstrate “a steady desire to keep looking and an awareness of what they cannot see, two qualities that seem essential to the tenacity of a marriage.”

Read more: https://aperture.org/editorial/lee-friedlanders-seven-decade-portrait-of-a-marriage/

Image: , Maria, Rockland County, New York, 1968

For its October 2026 issue, Wallpaper* magazine invited Carrie Mae Weems to serve as a guest editor. Weems’s edit highli...
10/15/2026

For its October 2026 issue, Wallpaper* magazine invited Carrie Mae Weems to serve as a guest editor. Weems’s edit highlights her work along with artists she admires, celebrating “monuments, mourning, meaning and memory,” Wallpaper* writes.

Her work is featured on one of three special covers for the issue, which also included guest editors Es Devlin and Palace Skateboards. Learn more: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/carrie-mae-weems-guest-edits-wallpaper
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Photographs by Carrie Mae Weems:
1. Memory, one of the two Assyrian sphinxes at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri by Carrie Mae Weems (cover image)
2. Photo of the artist by Audoin Desforges
3. One of the great pyramids of Giza
4. A detail of Lauren Halsey’s sculpture park Sister Dreamer (2026), an architectural ode to ‘tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles’ and classical ancient traditions
5. The circular foundations of the Tholos of Epidaurus, Greece, during ongoing conservation work
6. The Shape of Things (female), a photograph of an entrance to an ancient building in Djenné, Mali, taken by Weems during her first visit to Africa in 1993

PENN & FASHION, a tribute to Irving Penn and the mark he left on fashion photography, is on view at Maison Européenne de...
10/14/2026

PENN & FASHION, a tribute to Irving Penn and the mark he left on fashion photography, is on view at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris through January 17, 2027.

Unfolding chronologically, the show begins in the 1950s with Penn’s legendary photographs of Parisian haute couture collections. It includes his work from the 1970s with Ungaro and Courrèges, and his work with Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld the following decade. The exhibition also presents Penn’s collaboration with the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, and his striking images for the beauty pages of Vogue magazine in the 1990s and 2000s.

Learn more: https://www.mep-fr.org/en/event/penn-fashion-2/
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Images by Irving Penn: Ballet Society, New York, 1948 (Corrado Cagli, Vittorio Rieti, Tanaquil Le Clercq and George Balanchine), Collection MEP, Paris. Acquis en 1991 © Condé Nast; Red-Lacquered Lid, New York, 1994, Collection MEP, Paris. Acquisition ayant bénéficié du soutien de The Irving Penn Foundation en 2020 © The Irving Penn Foundation; Issey Miyake Fashion: Face Covered with Hair, New York, 1991, Collection The Irving Penn Foundation, New York © The Irving Penn Foundation

This year’s Aperture Gala will honor Hiroshi Sugimoto and Deana Lawson. The event will take place on November 5 at the A...
10/13/2026

This year’s Aperture Gala will honor Hiroshi Sugimoto and Deana Lawson. The event will take place on November 5 at the American Museum of Natural History, near Aperture’s new home on New York’s Upper West Side.

Aperture writes, “Across a six-decade career, Hiroshi Sugimoto has redefined the metaphysical possibilities of the still image. Through photography, architecture, sculpture, and performance, he has continuously probed the limits of perception and time in formally rigorous, experimental projects.” The location is especially fitting, as Sugimoto began his Dioramas series at the museum in 1974.

Learn more: https://aperture.org/gala-2026/
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Image: , Self Portrait, 2019

“My work comes out of my life.”—Peter HujarToday we remember Peter Hujar, who was born on this day in 1934. Hujar’s work...
10/11/2026

“My work comes out of my life.”
—Peter Hujar

Today we remember Peter Hujar, who was born on this day in 1934. Hujar’s work is known for the texture and poignancy with which he explores decay, sexuality, death, and the life we share in common.

New York: don't miss "Hujar:Contact," on view for just two more weeks at The Morgan Library & Museum. Offering an unprecedented look into the life, times, and creative evolution of the master photographer, the exhibition features more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements from the Morgan’s Peter Hujar Collection. Bearing editing marks and revealing intimate pictorial narratives, Hujar’s contact sheets tell the nuanced story of a lifetime, a community, and an era.⁠

Pictured: , Self-portraits at 189 Second Avenue, 1974⁠. Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum, Peter Hujar Collection, New York © Peter Hujar Foundation

Vince Aletti recently highlighted our publication Lee Friedlander: Maria for his Photo Book of the Month Club at Dear Da...
10/10/2026

Vince Aletti recently highlighted our publication Lee Friedlander: Maria for his Photo Book of the Month Club at Dear Dave Magazine. In the review, Aletti remarks that Friedlander's latest book is his "most personal" since his collected self-portraits.

Referencing Jeffrey Fraenkel's introduction titled "Scenes from a Marriage," Aletti notes, "Like any marriage, it’s moody and unsettled, especially toward the end, when Maria is in and out of the hospital. But that’s also when Friedlander is especially attentive and all the tenderness and obsessive focus of the earlier pictures really add up."

Thank you, Vince, for your thoughtful review! 💌

Lee Friedlander: Maria is available for purchase on our website or in our gallery. https://fraenkelgallery.com/shop/lee-friedlander-maria

Image: Lee Friedlander "Oregon" (1997)

Wishing a very happy birthday to our friend Sophie Calle ❤️In Britain, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in th...
10/10/2026

Wishing a very happy birthday to our friend Sophie Calle ❤️

In Britain, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the UK in over fifteen years is on view at Turner Contemporary through 24 January 2027. "Sophie Calle: Something Missing?" explores themes of memory, disappearance and longing, and brings together significant works from across Calle’s career. 🔗 https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/exhibitions/sophie-calle-something-missing

Opening next week in Italy, Museo MAXXI in Rome will present an overview of the French artist’s practice spanning more than forty years. Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi (Weddings, Breakups and Funerals Included) will be on view 16 October 2026–7 February 2027. 🔗 https://www.maxxi.art/en/events/sophie-calle-matrimoni-rotture-e-funerali-inclusi/
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Pictured: Jeffrey Fraenkel and Sophie Calle; , Twins (Max died), 2025 © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

In a new work by Richard T. Walker, yellow neon playfully snakes across a cluster of framed photographs, tracing a splas...
10/08/2026

In a new work by Richard T. Walker, yellow neon playfully snakes across a cluster of framed photographs, tracing a splash line of water before hinging over and through rocks. Juxtaposing built elements with modified natural materials, Walker's "thinking through you" (2026) probes our individual and collective experience of the natural landscape.

See this work in Southern Exposure's new exhibition Land/ Water/ Meat/ Noise, opening this Saturday, October 10, 6–8 PM: https://soex.org/projects-exhibitions/land-water-meat-noise

Bringing together artists working with water, landscape, food, and sound as primary mediums, the group show explores how these elements shape our environments. Visitors are invited to see, hear, and experience these materials in new ways, encountering them as living forces that move, transform, and leave traces across spaces, bodies, and time.
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Images: , thinking through you, 2026, archival pigment prints, artists frames, modified rocks, neon

Worcester Art Museum​'s ​"Wall at WAM​" serie​s, beg​un in 1998​, presents newly commissioned work by contemporary artis...
10/06/2026

Worcester Art Museum​'s ​"Wall at WAM​" serie​s, beg​un in 1998​, presents newly commissioned work by contemporary artists on a billboard-sized expanse overlooking the museum's Renaissance Court.

For the commission, Martine Gutierrez​'s installation "First Revelation of the Sovereign Queen," brings together photography, painting, collage, and sculptural elements​, with nods to the art historical influences found throughout the ​WAM galleries. The lighting and composition evoke European Baroque painting, ​while the scenes of nature ​are influenced by 16th-century Italian paintings and traditional East Asian ink painting​. Gutierrez's reclining pose is a trope seen throughout art history​, beginning with ancient mythological goddesses. ​As Gutierrez states: “Taking one visual language and making it speak differently, that transformation is in essence the mechanism of art’s history​...the translation of visual dialects.”

​The piece considers the limiting archetyp​es of a woman's role—maiden, mother, and crone—and presents her vision for a fourth archetype: the sovereign woman, or the queen. Possessing wisdom and experience, ​the sovereign woman represents the role of leadership​, and is define​d by her own autonomy.

Learn more: https://www.worcesterart.org/exhibitions/martine-gutierrez/
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Martine Gutierrez, First Revelation of the Sovereign Queen, 2026, installation view, Worcester Art Museum. Photo: Zachary Critchleytv

Address

49 Geary Street #450
San Francisco, CA
94108

Opening Hours

Tuesday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Wednesday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Thursday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Friday 10:30am - 5:30pm
Saturday 11am - 5pm

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+14159812661

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