The Fraenkel Gallery is a treasure for Bay Area arts audiences, a commercial gallery that serves the community as well as most museums in the quality of its exhibitions and the erudition of its programs and publications. One of its current exhibitions is The Book of Shadows, an exhibition and book based on Jeffrey Fraenkel’s eccentric personal collection.

For several years, as the field of vernacular and anonymous photography has gained wide interest, Fraenkel has been accumulating a snapshot collection whose common theme has been inclusion of the picture taker’s shadow within the frame. At the surface level the viewer is amused (often hilariously) and reassured of his superior sophistication as one inept and inapt image after another is seen. This soon passes as one realizes that there is much more to enjoy and to learn from these works.

In theater we must all agree to ignore that the fourth wall of any interior has been removed, allowing us, the audience, access to the scene. One thing these pictures do is to break through photography’s version of the theatrical fourth wall. That is, the illusion that we are observing through our own eyes, unmediated by the lens, is undercut when we see the actual photographer’s presence so apparent in the frame. Along those same lines our consciousness of the photographic dynamic is also heightened. Ordinarily we have a triangular psychological relation among ourselves as viewers, the image in the photograph, and the unseen photographer. In these snapshots, there is a revelation of the subject, the viewer, and the grounded physical reality of the photographer. To push that idea a bit further, one senses the intensity of the cameraman’s relation to his subjects more when one sees his presence, and the voyeuristic feelings of intrusion are often heightened, even on scenes of those long dead.

I am frequently amazed at how we are hard-wired to be hypersensitive to the human form. I often have the experience of seeing, at considerable distance and with their back turned, people I’ve only met once or twice who I recognize immediately through their bodily mannerisms. The ability to read the shadows for information is like that—we find we can learn a great deal about these people just from the way they are captured in silhouette.

Finally then these works do what only the best art does—they demand that we bring to bear our utmost skill at looking, at decoding, at finding the ironies, the odd juxtapositions, the beautiful accidents, that make life and culture so much fun, and affect how we perceive the world for days.

The Book of Shadows will be on view at Fraenkel Gallery from May 31st through August 11th, 2007.