He has portrayed creative people from the worlds of music, art and showbiz, captured surreal images of the boundlessness of the big city and brought the greats of photographic history in front of his camera. With ABE FRAJNDLICH. CHAMELEON, the Kunstfoyer presents the dazzling variety of themes of the American photographer Abe Frajndlich (*1946, Frankfurt am Main). Facets of his biography, which oscillates between many worlds, also find their place in the exhibition.

Around 200 works from the 1970s onwards are on display, including Frajndlich's earliest vintage prints from Cleveland. Streets, whether in New York, where the photographer lived for a long time, or in other places on his life's journey, are always the stage for his pictures. A chance encounter on the streets of London with John Kobal, the collector and publisher of 20th century Hollywood portraits, then led Abe Frajndlich to "his" themes of identity, freedom and photography.

One focus of the retrospective presents portraits of artists who influenced Abe Frajndlich's life. First and foremost, these are the performer Rosebud Conway, known as "Rosie", and Minor White, photographer, founder of the magazine Aperture and Frajndlich's photographic mentor. After his book Lives I've Never Lived about Minor White, Frajndlich decided to take pictures of photographers who, in his view, had influenced the 20th century. This became Masters of Light - Frajndlich's first major series in color, produced as a publication and exhibition by Eastman Kodak to celebrate the 150th anniversary of photography. Each of these staged images of the icons alludes individually to aspects of their life or work.

Commissioned by FAZ magazine, Frajndlich was able to give his personal insight into the American art scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Examples of this include studio stories with Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero and David Ireland, which can be seen here for the first time.

Sometimes with a mirror, sometimes with a mask or a group of viewers, Frajndlich transforms realities into illusions. In this way, he gives the audience access to emotions or irony, which are just as evident in his experimental urban scenes as in the sensual associations from his book Eros Eterna, without which the chameleon Frajndlich would be unthinkable. With the mysterious ambiguity inherent in many of his pictures, Abe Frajndlich succeeds masterfully in linking the history of photography, the diversity of the medium and the viewers' view of themselves.

ABE FRAJNDLICH. CHAMELEON was curated by Celina Lunsford, artistic director of the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, and co-curators Esra Klein and Andrea Horvay.