Fraenkel Gallery presents a new body of work by Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948). Inspired by the earliest photographic experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot, the 19th century inventor who developed the negative-positive process, Sugimoto refers to his newest pictures using Talbot’s own term, Photogenic Drawings.
Working from Talbot’s original paper negatives, Sugimoto’s vastly enlarged prints are arresting in their detail and atmosphere. The artist’s collaboration with Talbot encompasses the panoply of subject matter that has formed the backbone of photographic history—still-lifes, landscapes, architectural views, and portraits.
By returning to, and enlarging, these traces from the origins of photography, Sugimoto’s Photogenic Drawings re-examine the magical effects of these first ‘drawings with light’.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Photogenic Drawings
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Through 25 February 2012

(Above: Group of Seven at Lacock Abbey, April, 1848, 2009)