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Following the success of Allen Frame’s book Fever, (color photographs of his friends in New York in 1981), Gitterman Gallery presents rarely seen, vintage black and white prints from the same period in his career.

Frame came to New York in 1977 and began to photograph his friends in his apartment and theirs — intimately observed, unposed scenes that were influenced by his love of film and theater. After his first solo show in 1980, he found himself cast as Jack Nicholson in Gary Indiana’s play The Roman Polanski Story, starring his friend John Heys as Roman and Cookie Mueller as Sharon Tate. He was suddenly introduced to a world of downtown legends that included Bill Rice, Taylor Meade and Jack Smith. In the exhibition, Whereupon, a haunting photo of Heys and Mueller shows them coming out onto the terrace of Heys’ East Village penthouse terrace. There’s also a photograph of William Burroughs at home in the Bunker on the Bowery. Nan Goldin is seen sitting on Frame’s bed with artist Siobhan Liddell and a friend, their limbs mysteriously intertwined. Many of the same friends who appear in Fever show up in these black and white photographs: a self-portrait with painter friend Charlie Boone; Butch Walker with Charlie and his boyfriend Bill; a morning photo of a young man lying across a mattress on the floor as a young woman crosses the room.

I first met Darrel Ellis in 1981. I was 30 and he was almost 23. He had just broken up with the actor José Rafael Arango and we were at an East Village neighbourhood gay bar called The Bar, at 2nd Avenue and East 4th Street, half a block from José’s apartment. The Bar had been in existence just a few years and had become a popular, low- key hangout with a pool table and jukebox, notable for the actors, artists, and writers who frequented it, including Peter Hujar, John Heys, Bill Rice, Jim Neu, Frank Franca, Bob Gober, Dieter Hall, Ken Tisa, Alvin Baltrop, Stephen Barker, and many others. That night at The Bar I brought Darrel home to my fifth-floor walk-up apartment in the West Village, which I shared with my roommate, an actress from Mississippi named Butch Walker. The bathtub was still in the kitchen. Our relationship started romantically but was very short-lived and quickly changed into a friendship..

Feser has constructed works that defy our internal logic of perspective, creating apparent rhythms and movements where there are none.

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There’s a certain quality of light that refracts from a pool of water on a warm summer afternoon. With each ripple, a sunbeam dissolves into a universe of radiant sparkle; the effect can be intoxicating. Christopher Russell has leveraged this phenomenon as a window into the sublime. Each picture acts as a kind of mason jar — captured and sealed tight within the frame is something wild and untamed: sun-kissed beams of light, rendered in luminous hues of cyan and magenta, cascading across waves of wind-swept water. 

Photographs from 1981 illustrate the artist’s archival care for his community.

...For Frame, this act of archival care carries special weight, since his own creative community’s legacy was disastrously impacted by the AIDS crisis. Curator and scholar Drew Sawyer sets the context for this body of work with his opening essay, focusing on Frame’s milieu and distinct use of color photography: “Part of the pleasure of these photographs for present-day viewers might come from recognizing well-known artists such as Robert Gober or Cady Noland. What made Frame’s psychologically imbedded pictures radical at the time was his use of color and his focus on the private lives of a queer community.” The photographs capture the moment, in the 1980s in downtown New York and Brooklyn, just before there was any awareness of AIDS, how it would remain ignored for so long, and how it would rip through the lives of those pictured. As Frame reflects in the monograph, “We were full of joy and hopefulness about our lives, about what we would accomplish creatively, about our close-knit relationships.”...

Fever (Matte Editions, 2021) was selected by Vince Aletti as one of his top 10 Photobooks.

Frame’s color photographs of friends hanging out in New York and Brooklyn in 1981 inevitably recall Nan Goldin’s, but his perspective is brighter, less fraught, with darkness all but banished from these naturally lit scenes. Goldin makes a cameo appearance here, but she’s just one of a cast of artists, performers, and writers whose interactions evoke the spirit of this fragile, charged moment: a fever that broke long before the decade was done. —Vince Aletti

ICP Perspective

The SF Camerawork Benefit Auction 2021: The Roof Is on Fire will take place online with Artsy 
September 14 - 28th. 

This year’s auction will feature over 60 works by some of the world’s leading photographers and many of photography's most exciting emerging artists.

Over its 47-year history, SF Camerawork’s mission and programs have been dedicated to offering local artists early career opportunities toward the creation of their important work. This year's Benefit Auction raises crucial funds that directly support image makers, with contributing artists receiving up to 50% of the sale price for their works.

Link to bid on Artsy

Through August 24, 2021

Klea McKenna uses the photogram process to create unique gelatin silver prints that contain both vivid detail and ethereal abstraction. Unlike a photograph created with a camera, a photogram is a one-of-a-kind object that involves physical contact between a subject and the light-sensitive printing surface, representing the mark of that interaction. This exhibition is a curated selection of work from 4 different series, Rain Studies, Web Studies, Automatic Earth, and Generation.

Rain Studies are an ongoing series of unique gelatin silver photograms of rain made outdoors at night. McKenna began making these on the big Island in Hawaii, where rain is plentiful but continued them back home in California as it suffered through a period of severe drought.

Web Studies are unique gelatin silver photograms of rain caught in the webs of orb-weaver spiders. Remarkable feats of engineering built each day to catch prey, the webs are also delicate and damaged. Like the patterns found inside trees and in our own lives, the webs follow a particular form yet each is unique and exquisitely flawed.

In her series Automatic Earth, McKenna emphasizes the physicality of the photogram process and builds on it by forcing the paper to record texture as well as light. Working in near darkness she applies pressure on the center cut of a tree to physically imprint the texture into the photographic paper and then selectively exposes the paper to light creating what the artist calls a "photographic relief."

With Generation, McKenna applies this method to textiles and women's clothing from different cultures that are rich in the legacy of touch: from the labor of their making to the textures of the designs, to the marks of continual wear. For McKenna, her process "is driven by my desire for communication with women from a time and place different than my own...With each alteration, mending, and use, someone has inscribed themselves onto these textiles."

www.kmrarts.com

This Is Not a Fashion Photograph. Allen Frame

..."the pictures in Fever seem to draw upon an earlier influence: Italian postwar cinema, notably Michelangelo Antonioni. The looseness, spontaneity, and natural light in Frame’s work combines the immediacy of the snapshot with film’s wide-screen impact for a sense of emotional intimacy that’s contained but never cramped."

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