The Fraenkel Gallery has more to celebrate this spring than having been in business for 30 years: They were the right 30 years. They spanned the steady rise in the market value of photographs and the interest that critics and museum curators took in them. Fraenkel tracked and eventually began to do its part to power this upsurge in the prestige and economy of photography.
Jeffrey Fraenkel and business partner Frish Brandt accomplished this not by business acumen alone but also by earning the loyalty of extraordinary photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and Robert Adams.
The gallery has set itself apart in other ways. It has designed and published catalogs of many of its most significant shows - the latest is "Furthermore," the hefty 30th-anniversary volume - and it has ventured exhibitions of non-photographic art, some of them selected by artists not associated with camerawork, such as Steve Wolfe and Christian Marclay.
Its business success, expertise and adventurousness have put Fraenkel at the top of the heap of photography galleries.
The electrically idiosyncratic "Furthermore" lives up to and builds on Fraenkel's distinguished history. It would dazzle in any venue, in any season, but it presents an especially vivid case of Fraenkel's customary approach to exhibitions. It presumes the best of its visitors - that they have come not merely to graze but also to look, to keep track of what they notice, to marvel at photography's unique relations - historical, social, philosophical and creative - to reality.
The camera has intervened in the world and our thinking about it as no other artistic tool ever has. Paradoxically, that makes its influence harder, not easier, to delimit. Keeping that fact in mind offers one sort of path into "Furthermore."
The show opens with an unknown photographer's 1931 shot of a suicide note written on a piece of notepaper from Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. This introduction signals Fraenkel's prizing of a picture's fascination above, or on par with, its authorship.
The forensic photographer undoubtedly had no artistic ambition for his picture, yet its manifest content, and what it withholds - because the notepaper was folded and inscribed inside and out - will haunt anyone who reads it. The suicide note picture in this setting also declares the analogy between reading a text and reading a photograph.
The interplay between what pictures make available and what they deny us resurfaces as a theme throughout the show. A cluster of pictures linked by costume and disguise resounds with this theme, linking it with the tactics of self-presentation and self-knowledge that the ubiquity of the camera eye has taught us, or forced us to learn.
A group of nudes across the room answers the costumed set. Within it, Peter Hujar's 1976 picture of "Bruce de Saint Croix" taking himself in hand comically echoes Morton Schamberg's 1918 picture of "God," his Dada sculpture that marries a plumbing fixture and a miter box.
Group and family portraits also have a place here because trafficking in semblances makes resemblances among people one of photography's inevitable subjects.
Louis Faurer's "Family, Times Square, N.Y.C." (1950), with its humid color - a far more mysterious picture than it appears at first - fits naturally among the other portraits here. But it also strangely echoes the play of architectural forms in "Zeche Hannover, Bochum-Hordel, Rurhgebiet, Germany" (1973) by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who exhaustively surveyed the vanishing structures of heavy industry in black and white.
Extremes of portraiture are reached in the last room. Here "Bob Fine" in Harry Callahan's early '50s print appears, tiny as an exclamation point, punctuating a zigzag of light between adjoining buildings. Callahan might almost have set out to illustrate Vladimir Nabokov's thought that "our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
Nearby, Nicholas Nixon's "Self (06), Brookline" (2008) presents him wholly as a tangle of body hair and skin, almost close enough to smell. Just above it, another Callahan, "Weeds in Snow, Detroit" (1943), connects the Nixon graphically with the handwriting of the suicide note at the top of the show.
Well, I could go on. And that is part of the implication of the title "Furthermore": Not just that plenty more will follow from Fraenkel, but that, once we begin talking about pictures observantly, there will always seem to be more to say.
Fraenkel has used the luxury of its business success, as only a few galleries at its level do, to explore the meaning of connoisseurship and show that it does not depend on ownership.
Those to whom connoisseurship connotes mainly high technical quality will not be disappointed here, but they will feel their limits challenged.
Furthermore: 30th Anniversary Exhibition: Photographs and collage. Through June 26. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St., S.F. (415) 981-2661. www.fraenkel gallery.com.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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