Free Falling

Ran across work by Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto at Robert Tat Gallery here in SF. It was a trio of tiny prints no more than 2″ x 3″ grouped in a constellation inside a shadow box. The images were random and unrelated — a bird, an outstretched hand, a delicate nude — with the old [...]

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News Flash

So I missed this, but artist/writer Jocko Weyland had a show earlier this Spring at Kerry Schuss in NYC called “Almost News.” Wayland works for the AP NewsPhoto Library, which gives him access to a torrent of images going back 100 years.  Many of them, detached from their original news story, beg for explanation. The [...]

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The Last Days of W.

Stephen Wirtz Gallery is showing Alec Soth‘s photo series, “The Last Days of W.“  I wrote the exhibit up for Flavorpill: As W. heads back to Crawford for good, he leaves behind memories both pathetic and dire — flying size 10s, bungled phrases, and premature Mission Accomplished banners underscore the outrages of Abu Ghraib and [...]

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Bringing the War Home

In her unsettling photo collages Martha Rosler combines domestic images with snapshots of war. 60s housewives pull the blinds back on soldiers in trenches while teenagers with cell phones yammer as explosions go off behind them. The New York Times recently published a video slide show of her work.

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Invisible Nation

Salvadoran artist Victor Cartagena’s latest installation, Invisible Nation, fills the walls of Galeria de la Raza with swarms of official Latin American ID photos, many of them passport pictures from the 70s and 80s, thousands of nameless faces that impress with sheer numbers, but also make it seem necessary to look more closely at each [...]

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Valentine for San Francisco

Emilie Valentine started photoblogging before anyone even knew what the word “blog” meant. In 1995, she began a weekly online photo journal called “Snap City” in which she captured atmospheric slices of San Francisco on b&w film, developed the prints, usually about 4-6, and published them to the web with snappy captions—a hint of what [...]

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Objects in Mirror Appear Closer

Most Americans experience the landscape around them from the comfort of a moving vehicle. Lee Friedlander plays this idea out in his latest photo series, “America by Car,” at Fraenkel Gallery. In image after image, an American scene is framed by a windshield, a rolled down window, a side view mirror. These modern automobile interiors [...]

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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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The Way We Were

Anne Collier takes pop culture objects and images from the 70s and 80s, photographs them and then delivers them in conceptual format, wrapping sentimentality up in deadpan commentary. Magazines from 30 years ago with their dated production values and period clothes and hairdos. Posters of saccharine sunsets overlaid with equally saccharine poems. Images of a [...]

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Other People’s Pictures

Bertien van Manen is a Dutch artist whose work is on display at Yancey Richardson in New York. The current show features images from her travels across Russia, where she photographed people she befriended in the intimacy of their own home. Her style is an intriguing mix of documentary and personal. Van Manen has an [...]

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