Subversive Novelist Seeks Her Muse in Pictures
In San Francisco, Hanya Yanagihara stages an exhibition about loneliness and beauty.

Richard Misrach, Untitled (Hawaii XV), 1978 ยฉ the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Hanya Yanagiharaโs novel A Little Life is seemingly everywhere, from bookstore displays to a shelf in my therapistโs office. On the cover is a powerful, closely cropped photograph of a man in the throes of petit mort. His eyes are tensely shut, his hand gracefully splayed along his cheek in a classical pose fit for a Greco-Roman sculpture. Iโd seen this picture in Fraenkel Galleryโs 2014 Peter Hujar exhibition, Love & Lust, which positioned male nudes and erotic works in the context of gay history and bohemian New York. Hujarโs Orgasmic Man (1969) makes a particularly enthralling icon for A Little Life, leading one to imagine this unnamed man is the emotional focus of a feverishly addictive book. Yet the choice of a man in ecstasy is ironic; the book itself reveals a plot focused on pain, addiction, and abuse. (The Guardianโs laudatory take is headlined โrelentless suffering.โ)

Alec Soth, Riverview Motel, 2005 ยฉ the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Yanagihara has been visiting Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for seventeen years, so the appearance of a summer group show curated by the author isnโt entirely out of left field. Her history with the gallery suggests she is clearly aware of Fraenkelโs large stable of photographers. Yet the resulting exhibition, How I Learned to See: An (Ongoing) Education in Pictures, doesnโt offer many surprisesโmost of the photographs by Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, Katy Grannan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nicholas Nixon, and others, including Hujar, have been shown here beforeโbut Yanagiharaโs exhibition has a literary bent that gives the works a minor new spin.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lucybelle Crater and bakerly, brotherly friend, Lucybelle Crater, 1970โ72 ยฉ The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
How I Learned to See takes the dialogue between image and text in the opposite direction as the cover of A Little Life by using words as an entry to the pictures. The show is installed in thematic chapters named after the kind of big themes that fuel great novels: Loneliness, Love, Aging, Solitude, Beauty, and Discovery. Each begins with its own text panel, written by the curator. The first reveals how Yanagihara is casting a wide novelistic net with her headings, describing them as โthe things that define any life, and therefore the things that define all of us, a chronicling of the perpetual mystery of being alive.โ Itโs a serviceable, if broad, premise, though not quite as free as one would expect from an outsider set loose in a trove of major works.

Robert Adams, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968 ยฉ the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
In many ways, the result feels like the works are selected simply to illustrate themes. The โLonelinessโ chapter, for example, features Robert Adamsโs Colorado Springs, Colorado (1968), a classic, Edward Hopper-esque black-and-white image of a suburban ranch house faรงade with a womanโs silhouette framed in a window. Itโs a great picture that declares loneliness straightforwardly. So does Alec Sothโs Riverview Motel (2005), a color image that presents the noir narrative setting of fleabag lodgings where some solitary character is holed up on the lam, perhaps the worn, gender fluid character in Grannanโs blaring sunlit Anonymous, Los Angeles (2008).

Katy Grannan, Anonymous, Los Angeles, 2008 ยฉ the artist and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Portraits of same-sex couples populate the โLoveโ section. Pictures by Nan Goldin and Arbus, and a Meatyard photo of his wife โin a hideous hagโs mask.โ Yanagiharaโs wall text points to illegal, ambiguous, tortured, damaged, artistic, parental, and defiant versions of love. These images are narrative provoking; they invite us to imagine a particular scenario for each. As such, the exhibition sometimes feels like a collection of writerโs prompts.

Peter Hujar, Joseph Raffael at the Botanical Gardens, 1956 ยฉ The Estate of Peter Hujar and courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
The best moments are when Yanagihara uses the exhibition as a platform to ask questions. In the โBeautyโ section, she ponders what that concept means to the camera: โIs it a lovely face? Or something else: a child captured in a moment of self-generated ecstasy; a wooden house piebald with shadows; a second of abandon we shouldnโt be witness to . . . but are?โ Among the few surprises are two Hujar photographs from the 1950s. One is Joseph Raffael at the Botanical Gardens (1956), a portrait of a handsome artist sitting amidst foliage: a young man captured in a moment of thrilling contemplation. Yanagihara understands that seeing such potent images are as rooted in time as reading a novel. โThe fact that what makes something beautiful is, after all, its temporality,โ she writes. โBlink, turn your head, and itโs gone.โ