Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Place, a group exhibition of photography. 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, and William Wegman.