NEW YORK, NY.- Jim Krantz occupies a unique place in the history of contemporary art and photography. His pictures of cowboys were re-photographed by Richard Prince and became not only the highest-selling images ever to be auctioned, but were used as banners by the Guggenheim Museum when they held their 2007 mid-career retrospective of Prince’s work.

It was not an accident that Krantz’s work was selected by Prince. Krantz had studied with Ansel Adams and Paul Caponigro, and since the 1980s had been mixing his personal work with assignments and campaigns for companies from Samsung to the U.S. Marines. Focusing largely on the American West, Krantz is known for his combination of technical skill and the emotive resonance of his imagery. He is constantly pushing the boundaries of the medium using every format from traditional cameras to drones.

Recently, Krantz has collaborated with Neville Wakefield - former Senior Curatorial Advisor for PS1 MoMA and Curator of Frieze - on projects ranging from a Western portfolio shot for Adam Kimmel to the recent contemporary art edition of Playboy.

Julian Wasser started his career in photography in the Washington DC bureau of the Associated Press where he met and accompanied the famous news photographer Weegee – who would become a lasting influence on him. In the mid-60s Wasser moved to Los Angeles as a contract photographer for TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE magazines and becoming internationally known as the go to guy for getting candid but memorably composed photographs. (His iconic images of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston; Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz; and a young Jodie Foster are already classics.)

In 1968 TIME Magazine assigned Wasser to go to the home of the young writer Joan Didion whose book Slouching Towards Bethlehem was becoming a literary sensation. “I’d read her fiction,” said Wasser. “and she didn’t miss a thing. She was such a heavyweight person.”

Wasser shot Didion at her rented house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, where she lived with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana Roo. “It was a nice, cozy house,” Wasser remembers. “And she was a very easy person to talk to. No Hollywood affectations.”

They started the shoot inside the house, and then moved outside where Wasser posed Didion with her recently acquired yellow Corvette Stingray. Didion has said that the photograph with Quintana Roo on her lap was her favorite, but the shots with the Stingray and the indoor three-quarter portrait became such icons of style that they inspired the fashion house Celine to do a campaign with the model Daria Werbowy posing in the window of a car just like Didion.

For their project show – Didion by Wasser – the gallery is exhibiting selected published images as well as outtakes and never before seen contact sheets of Didion that with their repetitive variations take on a Warholian aura.