Lines in the Sand

SF photographer Sean McFarland‘s Polaroid landscapes are streaked with movement, traced with the remnants of a human or a natural footprint — whether it’s a twister touching down, a small biplane scuttling above the earth or a sentimental starburst of light in an ocean sunset. His night scenes have the otherworldy dislocation of a day-for-night [...]

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Man with a Room-Size Camera

San Francisco-based photographer, John Chiara, works with a lumbering camera he built himself that he carts around with him on the back of a flatbed truck. He creates unique prints by exposing directly onto photographic paper placed on the inside back wall of the camera, using his hand over the lens as a dodge and [...]

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Gender Play

Kimberly Austin‘s images waver and blur on silk and muslin banners. Her technique involves developing the same image on two different swaths of textile, using two distinct alternative processes. She prints one sheet of fabric using cyanotype and the other using Van Dyke then hangs both layers of material over a metal rod so that [...]

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Grey Area

Maizie Gilbert compares looking at her photos to “watching a movie in a foreign language without subtitles.” Forget about the words just follow the pictures and try to extract fleeting threads of a storyline. Gilbert shoots color and b&w with a 1970s Polaroid land camera, using the lo-tech device to snap dreamy film frames. A [...]

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An Hungarian in Paris

I went to the preview for SF Camerawork’s annual benefit auction last night. Lots of good contemporary work along with a smattering of older pieces. One of the vintage images that jumped out at me was Geza Vandor‘s “Scissors and Lace” (c. 1930) which shows a photogram jumble of sewing notions. Born in Hungary in [...]

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Remains of the Day (or Week or Month)

Artkrush decorated their last newsletter with German photographer Vera Lutter‘s camera obscura image of San Marco. The picture has all the inverted elegance of a film negative with its shadows that gleam and bright sunlight that turns black. But Lutter’s images are about more than just light and dark. Standard photographs are instantaneous; Lutter‘s are [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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