PLACE

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Place, a group exhibition of photography. Place will be on view from March 7 through April 25, 2024. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, March 7, from 5 to 7 PM.

In his seminal work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes, “the scene can be arranged by the photographer, but in the world of illustrated media, it is a ‘natural’ scene which the good reporter has had the genius, i.e., the luck, to catch.” In Berggruen Gallery’s first group presentation of photography since 2010, twelve photographers “catch” their scenes with impossibly good fortune. Unified by this plain but fundamental preoccupation, these photographers use place to investigate a variety of themes, from decay (Gregory Crewdson’s The Mattress, Joel Sternfeld’s Abandoned Freighter, Homer, Alaska, July 1984) to spectatorship (Richard Misrach’s White Man Contemplating Pyramids, Diane Arbus’ 42nd Street movie theater audience, N.Y.C.) to artistic legacy (Brassaï’s Henri Matisse dans son atelier a Paris). Spanning over a century of photographic work, Place is a testament to how an acuity for setting and moment transforms a photograph from a mere form of documentation into a pen rife with opportunities for storytelling.

The exhibition will feature work by the following artists: 

Ansel Adams
Richard Avedon
Diane Arbus
Brassaï
Gregory Crewdson
Imogen Cunningham
Axel Hütte
Lee Friedlander
Mary McCartney
Richard Misrach
Joel Sternfeld
Thomas Struth
Richard T. Walker
William Wegman

Place, March 7 – April 25, 2024. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.