CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/18/2018

Adam Fuss and Stephen Frailey at Spoonbill Studio

Wednesday, April 25 at 7PM, in celebration of Adam Fuss's new book, Water, and as part of part of The Enlightenment Series, curated by Arezoo Moseni in collaboration with Miles Bellamy, Spoonbill Studio presents Adam Fuss in conversation with Stephen Frailey. Book signing to follow.

New York based photographer Adam Fuss has been exploring the subject of water for more than 30 years, and is perhaps best known for his life-sized photograms of this essential element. He is inspired by his personal observation of nature and his reinterpretation of the techniques of early photography. In dialogue with photographic pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Eugene Atget and Anna Atkins, Fuss distills the essence of photography's light interacting with a sensitized surfaces to create evocative, startlingly beautiful images of the natural world. Roberta Smith has described Fuss's style as "breathtaking visual extravagance born of a combination of pure controlled chance and superb control."

Adam Fuss: Water is the first book dedicated solely to the subject that the photographer is most associated with. Charting a sophisticated engagement with the interaction of water and light throughout his entire career, Fuss personally selected all the pictures, which appear here in exquisite reproductions. Some of his photographs of water are now classics of contemporary photography, such as the swimming snakes, the splashing newborn baby and the studies of concentric circles created by water drops; these are represented in this new volume alongside many previously unpublished images.

Adam Fuss: Water will be available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

ADAM FUSS was born in London in 1961 and grew up in rural England, where he first began to document the natural environment through photography. This led to an experimentation with unconventional photographic processes and his eventual abandonment of the camera altogether. Fuss's work is distinctive for its contemporary reinterpretation of photography's earliest techniques, particularly the camera-less methods of the daguerreotype and photogram. He believes that in order for any photographic technique to work, it should be personalized and transfigured into a greater metaphor, engaging processes that take place in the natural world. Best known for life size photograms of water, Fuss's imagery is imbued by the spiritual and poetic. His deliberate distillation of the essence of photography—a flash of light on a sensitized surface—emphasizes themes of transformation and perception. Intentionally avoiding the detailed clarity of traditional photography, Fuss's works are ghostly manifestations of light and shadow. Fuss has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. Widely shown, his work is represented in many American and international collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He is represented by Cheim & Read in New York.

STEPHEN FRAILEY is the Chair of the Photography Department and also the co-chair of the MPS Fashion Photography Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and received his BA from Bennington College. He has had solo exhibitions at 303 Gallery and the Julie Saul Gallery and group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; International Center for Photography, New York; and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and an Aaron Siskind Foundation Grant. He was a visiting artist at the Donald Judd Foundation and was twice nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Arts Magazine, ARTnews, The New Yorker, and other prominent publications. His critical writing on photography have appeared in Artforum, Print, and Art on Paper. In 2007 he founded the photography magazine Dear Dave, and is its Editor in Chief. He was the Chair of the Graduate photography program at Bard College from 1998 to 2004. In 2003, he founded the Auction for Photographic Education in Afghanistan to create a photography department at Kabul University. He is the co-founder of the Art+Commerce Festival in New York.

AREZOO MOSENI is an artist. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at major venues in the United States and abroad such as FIAC 2014, Rome Art Week 2016, and Mykonos Biennial 2017, and also held at many private and public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Musee de La Photographie and most recently Smith College Museum of Art. She is the recipient of several fellowships and grants including the Carnegie Corporation of New York | New York Times award, Yaddo Fellowship and Artists Space Independent Project grant. She received a BFA at Utah State University, a MA and MFA at the University of New Mexico, and a MLIS at Pratt Institute.

Adam Fuss and Stephen Frailey
Wednesday, April 25: 7-9 PM
Spoonbill Studio
99 Montrose Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11206
718.387.7322