CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/2/2015

The Plot Thickens

"Photography's plot has been thickening since the first photographers made their second photograph," Jeffrey Fraenkel writes in The Plot Thickens, Fraenkel Gallery's intriguing and magnificently produced centuries-spanning survey of mostly unpublished photographs. "Now, 175 years later, the plot has so thickened that little consensus exists about what, exactly, a 'photograph' is. (Several recent museum exhibitions have explored precisely this question.) New forms and functions proliferate, and we find ourselves swamped in images that evaporate, as exemplified by Snapchat, as quickly as they appear. The irony, of course, is that Snapchat itself may speedily evaporate, to be replaced by an even more seductive image dematerialization… For anyone … inclined to pause, look and think about photographs in an age when paying attention may be a disappearing art, the ninety-odd images on [these] pages are guaranteed to reward the effort." Peter Hujar's 1974 Self-Portrait Jumping (II) is reproduced from The Plot Thickens.