Long story short

“Humans, unlike other living creatures, want to make and look at pictures.” So begins the introduction to the jaw-dropping array of photographs in Long Story Short, the latest in Fraenkel Gallery’s idiosyncratic surveys of photography since the medium’s invention 180 years ago.
Among the images to be discovered here are Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 study of a contortionist performing extreme body movements; Man Ray’s 1923 ghostlike rayograph of an irradiated banjo; and a female impersonator applying her lipstick backstage, as seen by Diane Arbus in 1959.