Vanishing Point

The De Young Museum’s retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work is phenomenal.
Entering the first gallery is like stepping into a dimly lit theater. The room is dark with only small, diffused spotlights on each work. All of the familiar pieces are there, the dioramas from the Museum of Natural History, the wax figures, [...]

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Heavens Above

David Maisel’s photos look like Richard Diebenkorn dropped his paintbrush and took up a camera. His photos of the earth from above compress geographical texture into flat abstraction. Salt flats and polluted lake beds escape the 3-D realm for a moment and become just intense fields of color.
The earth seen from above has never [...]

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To Sleep To Dream

To look at Wang Ningde’s latest photo exhibit at SF Camerawork, you’d think all of China is sleeping. “Some Days” is a series of images in which people are going about daily activities—taking a train, riding a bike, playing cards, standing in a garden—but they are all somnambulating, eyes closed, deep in slumber.
I didn’t know [...]

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Secret History

Apollonia Morrill loves old buildings, can’t get enough of the ghosts of things past.
Based in San Francisco, Morrill has created four documentary series that capture the spirit of an historic space. She’s taken her clean abstract style to look at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, a vintage movie house; San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, a once thriving [...]

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Richter Scale

I visited the De Young Museum over the weekend and took a long look at Gerhard Richter’s “Strontium.” It’s the second time I’ve seen it and it’s still stunning. The image to the left does it no justice (you can click to see it slightly larger), but you won’t really get the full [...]

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Little People

Stumbled across the photographer Audrey Heller while browsing the local quarterly food journal, Edible San Francisco; her photo graces the cover. Heller specializes in images that stage Lilliputian-sized people in the middle of our much larger day-to-day universe, reeling the viewer in to look more closely at these miniature toy worlds.
In “The Shrew,” a [...]

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Babbette’s Feast

When I was down in LA, I got the chance to visit Babbette Hines’ Found Photo Gallery.
Hines is the author of Photo Booth, a beautiful collection of shots ranging over 75 years, beginning back in the 20s. You can find it in most bookstores, but Babbette would probably like it if you bought it online [...]

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Found Photo Meister

Imagine Bernd & Hilla Becher had decided to create a typology of found photos. This project, if it existed, might be similar to the work of Joachim Schmid, a Berlin-based artist who has created over the past 25 years a relentless catalog of vernacular photography. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco [...]

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Human/Nature

Liza Ryan’s evocative photos juxtapose flora, fauna and human form. She had an exhibit at Griffin Contemporary in LA last month and I made a note to blog about her work. I gravitated toward her image clusters which are little packets of visual goodness. Ryan groups fairly small-sized photos into a loosely [...]

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The Kid Is Alright

At age 26, Ryan McGinley was one of the youngest artists ever to get a solo show at the Whitney.
McGinley takes pictures of his circle of friends, capturing them as they play, party, kiss, sleep, bathe, surf, climb trees. It might sound childish, but McGinley is a pro at capturing pure enthusiasm. Motion and [...]

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