Allen Frame: Whereupon

*limited quantity signed by Allen Frame

Palermo Publishing announces the publication of its first monograph of photography, Whereupon, a selection of images by New York photographer Allen Frame, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, in black and white and color. Whereupon expands the premise of his recent book Fever, (color photographs of 1981), to show a broader time period with the same subject: his artist friends in their apartments and lofts and on the streets of New York. Also included are scenes from theater rehearsals of David Wojnarowicz’s Sounds in the Distance, which Frame co-adapted and co-directed in 1983 and 84.

As Mark Alice Durant writes: His images are not decisive moments, they are not exactly portraits, or figure studies either. They exist interstitially. A quiet intimacy and muted staging share the proscenium, as friends, acquaintances, and strangers pause and proceed through the mostly nocturnal tableaux. Allen’s photographs are unique in their elegant understatement, they observe without judgment, are melancholy but not sentimental, smolder without clamor.

Frame is also a writer and has collaborated with the publisher/editor Michela Palermo previously on three photo zines, Suddenly, Sorry for Your Loss, and Boy on a Dolphin, which have featured his poems in juxtaposition with his photographs and anonymous photos, drawings, and paintings.

Allen Frame’s first photography monograph, Detour, was published in 2001, followed by Fever in 2021. His book Innamorato was published in 2023. He won the Rome Prize in photography in 2017/18, and spent a year in Italy. After residencies in St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, Russia, through CEC Artslink in 2019, he returned to Italy in 2021 as a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieiri in Umbria. Much of his recent work has been made in Italy. In the last year he has written three essays about the artist Darrel Ellis, who is prominently featured in Fever. Other notable artists are included both in Fever and Whereupon, including Cady Noland, Robert Gober, Frank Moore, and Nan Goldin. He is an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Pratt Institute (MFA) and also teaches at the School of Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography in New York, and for Strudelmedia. He grew up in Mississippi and graduated from Harvard. His work is represented by Gitterman Gallery.