Going Against the Grain

The New York Times profiled tintype photographer John Coffer in an article illustrated with Coffer’s own tintype self-portraits and accompanied by a multimedia piece in which Coffer speaks about his life and work. As a boy, Coffer became fascinated with a tintype of his great great grandfather and later decided he wanted to learn the [...]

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Paris Photo

Visited this little gallery/bookstore called Chez Higgins during my vacation in Paris this June. After walking through a very dark courtyard on rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, I stepped into a brightly lit room with no windows, only glass-covered cabinets full of books lining all the walls. The owner, Eric Higgins, creates limited edition photographic portfolios. [...]

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Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture

In his photo series, “Ridin’ Dirty Face,” Mike Brodie (aka The Polaroid Kidd) crisscrossed the country riding the rails, capturing raw pictures of young hobos, grimy, tattoed, romantic 21st-century gypsies.
The series also includes candids of the inhabitants of a small seaside town in Maine where a group of runaway middle-class kids live off the grid [...]

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Pixel Imperfect

SF Gate ran an article “Digital Images Dominate—But With A Downside” which talks about the digital versus print divide and features interviews with Jeffrey Fraenkel, multimedia artist J.D. Beltran, SFMOMA photography curator, Corey Keller, and photographers John Priola and Lucy Gray.
The piece looks at how digital is changing our reality. “If film [...]

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35,000 Feet

I’ve been commuting from SF to LA and back once a week, logging the frequent flyer miles. Last week I ended up in a window seat and it made me realize I haven’t gotten over the sheer wonder of climbing 35,000 feet, [...]

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Story of the Eye

I picked up “Diane Arbus: The Libraries” at Fraenkel Gallery. It’s a visual catalog of the books and photos that belonged to Arbus’s personal library, the actual contents of which were displayed as part of the Arbus retrospective, Revelations at SFMOMA back in 2003. The book is beautifully put together—accordion-pleated pages inside a [...]

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Pinhole Wizard

I was rummaging through some papers and came across a flyer for an exhibit I saw a while back at Varnish Gallery. The show was called “A Collection of Souls from the Borderland” and it showcased Wayne Belger’s pinhole cameras and the photos he takes with them.
Belger, an LA-based artist trained originally as a machinist, [...]

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Book of Shadows

As a collector of found photos, I had to see the show at Fraenkel Gallery which features images from Jeffrey Fraenkel’s private vernacular photo collection. He centered the exhibit around images in which the photographer casts a shadow, creating a dark silhouette that looms larger than life depending on the angle of the sun. [...]

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Buried Treasure

I just received a copy of the first printing of the second edition of E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville for my birthday. I love the history behind this set of photographs—Bellocq the commercial photographer and social misfit producing images of the ladies of New Orleans’ red light district in a project that was private and personal, never [...]

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