This process is present in Figuring (2019–2020), a project born out of a malfunctioning shutter. Chakrabarty cut through the shutter’s frame, leaving no mechanical control over its speed. Left with a light-catching device with only a tiny sensor, he had to retrain himself. He wanted to start a dialogue between the decayed camera, how we understand objects, and how these objects could potentially be seen. “Although photography is a container of my thoughts and experiences, it also adds new things,” he says. “When accidents happen, the whole process teaches me something.”

It was also an inquiry about light that led the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute graduate to create Stardust (2014–2020), a project based on a fictional narrative about a species so advanced they can move through space-time across the cosmos, seeking out their origin and future. By combining his scientific knowledge with this story, Chakrabarty invites viewers to question their place in the universe in a world rife with territorial and political conflict. Chakrabarty asks: if we were made out of photons instead of atoms, would we experience identity and politics in the way we do today?

Chakrabarty was nominated for Ones to Watch by fellow Bangladeshi photographer and former One to Watch (2016), Shadman Shahid. “Debashish seems to have an expansive definition of photography, constantly searching for the limits of the medium,” says Shahid. “This courageous, exploratory spirit is what allows him to produce such unique works.” 

Looming above these experiments are Chakrabarty’s greater questions about science and how we understand our world. Though his first encounter with the cosmos came from Carl Sagan, he discovered similar ideas among Bangladeshi poets and thinkers. 

“The way we have constituted the mechanisms of science originated from European enlightenment, and this infrastructure of knowledge is backed up by their ideas,” he says. “It’s high time that we find a balance between Western modernity and local modernity. When you have to deal with the social and political scenario, you need to have an understanding of your own local ideas, about their existence, their struggles.” 

debashishchakrabarty.com

While the images we immediately call to mind regarding space exploration contain smiling astronauts, professionals in lab coats, and shiny technological advancements, its history is fraught with political and military narratives that remain out of sight. “People tend to think of the Space Shuttle as a civilian space project, but it was also completely compromised by military and intelligence priorities, and was used extensively to carry out secret missions that remain classified today,” Bush reflects. “We have to have these things out in the open, so we can understand the ways that civilian projects are perhaps twisted away from their original intentions by those military aims.”

Bush’s method for laying this history bare is a new book titled Depravity’s Rainbow. A collection of images made by the artist at various rocket development sites in Germany is re-envisioned alongside archival documents and photographs from scientific archives related to the V-2. In order to present the images cohesively, he recreated them as cyanotypes – a medium both conceptual and pragmatic. “It was invented by an astronomer,” Bush explains, “then used extensively by engineers as the ‘blueprint’ process” – both intimately tied to the project’s subject matter. What’s more: hydrogen cyanide can also be found within cyanotype chemistry, and is the same gas that was used for exterminating people during the Holocaust.

“We have profound problems here on Earth, from the legacies of centuries of injustice, to the burgeoning threat of climate change. Space exploration is at best a distraction, and at worst a contributor to many of these problems.”

Throughout the book, gritty archival shadows appear in a riveting narrative, telling the story of Von Braun’s life in two sequences: his time before 1945, designing military rockets for Nazi Germany, and his life post-1945, working for US government agencies such as Nasa. “An event like Von Braun meeting President John F Kennedy in 1962 can be juxtaposed against an event like him meeting Adolf Hitler in 1936,” Bush explains. “The aim is not to say these two events or people are the same, but it is to marvel at the possibility that Von Braun could have met them both in his life, showing the connections and links between these two halves.”

While the selfless ambition of space exploration that Bush hopes to subvert has permeated our collective consciousness for decades, many have started to sense cracks in the veneer. Last year, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos famously jetted into space while civilians dealing with the social and financial ravages of the pandemic looked on, perplexed. Additionally, Bezos’ fellow billionaire Elon Musk talks about space travel with a fanboy vigour that feels equally out of touch. When asked why it is important to share the story of Von Braun with others, Bush alludes to these strange cultural moments, but connects it back to the greater history of mankind.

“We have profound problems here on Earth, from the legacies of centuries of injustice to the burgeoning threat of climate change. Space exploration is at best a distraction and at worst a contributor to many of these problems, and if we want to gradually change it into a project which truly is ‘for all mankind’, we need to recognise these problems and this history.”

lewisbush.com

You can support the publication of Depravity’s Rainbow by pledging the artist’s Kickstarter here.

Sewell’s images arrive in waves throughout the publication. They move between the shore and the tides, the perspective constantly shifting. Sequences build and crash, images repeat, and sometimes there are almost invisible nuances between one and the next. One constant is the airy, elemental setting of the beach contrasted against monochrome images of technology, reminding us how deeply enmeshed contemporary life and the digital world are. 

A loose-leaf insert accompanies the book, featuring an essay by writer Eugénie Shinkle and a series of observations written by Sewell. One line from Sewell stands out: “I can scrutinise this cable and learn facts about it,” he writes, “how many terabytes are passing through it per second, how long it is, I might even learn who is using it, what stories are flowing through it – but that doesn’t make the fact of it…any less mysterious.” Indeed, as viewers, it’s impossible not to be mystified by the cables that populate Sewell’s images – by their power, how many thousands of miles they reach across, and, ultimately, how impossibly small their starting points are. How can the near-infinite amount of data we create and transmit each day travel through these objects, ostensibly unremarkable and built by human hands? 

Hands are a motif throughout the book. Sewell captures them playing on phones, clasping each other, reaching into the water and retrieving shells. Even the publication’s final image depicts a young girl’s hand drawing a curved line in the sand – the beginning of a circle, perhaps, looping us back to where we began. In the end, it’s touch and gesture that radiate from the work. Every image speaks of connection – digital, invisible, physical. It’s worth noting that Sewell completed the project during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns, which adds another layer to a book relating to the intangibles of communication.

Sewell is currently exhibiting Known and Strange Things Pass at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, and here again, he’s thought about the viewer’s journey. He invites his audience to get close to some images and step back for others, employing different sized prints and frames hung above and below eye level. In the exhibition and photobook, Sewell proves that photography is more than a surface medium. It can conjure visual experiences of the invisible and activate elements of the world we may otherwise never see.

Known and Strange Things Pass is published by Skinnerboox. The exhibition is at Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, until 30 October 2021.

This month, Paris-based RVB Books published a monograph devoted to Surface Tension. Though the overall scope of this multi-year project is wide, the book necessitated a narrow selection. “The edit is very urgent, almost apocalyptic,” says Soren. “After the Book of Job year we all experienced thanks to Covid-19, we felt that sticking to the images that screamed ‘emergency’ made the most sense.”

On the front cover, fingerprints merge with billowing, black smoke. Long, iridescent smudges on the back cover feel meteoric, like falling stars, as two cars burn in the background. Flipping through the book, images of landscapes and buildings ablaze, protestors in the streets, police lights, and officers creating human barricades overwhelm the viewer.

“The social injustice and environmental destruction images all have the same tone and made the sequencing quite seamless,” Soren continues. “It is an understatement to say that we humans are not doing well. I wanted the book’s sequence to reflect that.” 

“The human markings are seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows towards us, unrelentingly. If I don’t amplify them, this conflict won’t be pronounced enough.”

In exhibitions, Soren’s Surface Tension pictures are large, even monumental, in scale, forcing the viewer to confront visceral evidence — the “oily, messy, teary and sweaty” as she describes it — of our untiring interactions with the screens of our devices. “The human markings are seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows towards us, unrelentingly,” she explains. “If I don’t amplify them, this conflict won’t be pronounced enough.”

Soren and RVB adeptly translate this experience from the walls, conveying the project’s concerns through the book medium. Closed, the book is slightly larger than the average iPad, which enables easy delving into the richly textured photographs, while alluding to the scale and experience of the device. Highly glossy paper and UV varnish is used throughout and the reproductions are surrounded by thin, black borders, also evoking tablet and cell phone screens. Full-page reproductions where the on-screen content is relatively legible are combined with highly magnified details emphasising the physicality of our interactions with these devices, eschewing obvious context.

“There are one or two places where the complete image is never shown,” she tells me. “At first, my reaction was to try to find a place for the full frame image in the book. However, I grew to like the relationship between only showing glimpses, details in the case of a book, of the scene. It was conceptually germane to connect the superficial experience of experiencing life online to the partial details we selected for the book.” 

In her essay for Surface Tension, Jia Tolentino writes: “We want desperately to be human in the face of our cold inanimate translator. We hope that somehow the act of witnessing will make us more human, and not less.” Reading this for the first time, Soren recalls thinking,“‘yes! That’s it! That’s what I’ve learned spending six years making this work.’ It was as if she was inside my brain….” The disquieting message underlying Soren’s seductive work will remind me to be truly present during upcoming in-person and real-world engagements and to actively reflect on the effects of my considerable screen time.

tabithasoren.com

Surface Tension is published by RBV Books and is out now. Click here for more information

In Kratsman and Pinchevsky’s images of Israel-Palestine, currently on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the landscape is depicted in around 100 times more detail than images of the region obtained through Google Earth. These photographs restore details that have disappeared from official maps: Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, the year Israel declared statehood; villages belonging to nomadic Arab Bedouin tribes, unrecognised by the state; and the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line set out after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. “The places that we chose to map are all connected to the history of forced displacement in Israel and Palestine,” explains Pinchevsky.  

Their images of al-Jammama, a former Palestinian village in Israel’s Negev desert, show the ploughed agricultural fields of Kibbutz Ruhama, the Israeli community which lives there now. Around these brown fields are untended swaths of green: untouched parts of the former village. “You have two layers here,” explains Kratsman, “The green is 1948. And the brown is now.” 

The artists supplement their aerial images with close-up shots of conditions on the ground. In one photograph of Umm al-Hiran [above], an unrecognised Bedouin village, a tree sprouts from the ruins of a demolished house. “The tree became a kind of monument for the house that was there before. Because we are allowed to destroy the house but not the tree,” Kratsman says.

Each image title includes the site’s coordinates and altitude, as well as a timestamp. These details function as another kind of map: one for visitors to track how places have changed over time. “We go to document places that are under the threat of displacement and we know that if we go back there in a few years, it will look different,” explains Pinchevsky. 

Anti-Mapping asserts a fundamental human “right to see” that transcends the will of any government, corporation, or establishment. Kratsman and Pinchvesky are working to preserve this right by building a high-resolution archive of the fluctuating Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Their project is at once a revelation of the past, a record of the present, and a resource for the future. As Kratsman explains, “It’s only the starting point, the hook to talk about the place we live in.” 

Anti-Mapping is on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art until 25 November 2021.

The series began in November 2020 after Slanted magazine commissioned CROSSLUCID to create 5000 unique covers for an issue delving into the impact of AI on design and our daily lives. The project further speculates on the many underlying structures that inform our identity and how they might emerge in the life forms that will populate our future world. 

Landscapes builds off of the collective’s last photobook, Landscapes Between Eternities, published by Distanz Verlag in 2018, which visualises otherworldly figures and forms flourishing in a future that exists beyond binaries. The book investigates the many ways we construct identities and perceive bodily expressions through portraits of humans melding with props and shots of elusive objects.

CROSSLUCID met Sarolli and Quaranta in 2019 while working on a project with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy. “We had many fruitful conversations with them about the potentialities of AI, specifically GANs, and shared similar goals in terms of exploring this field,” recalls Toth. For the new portrait series, CROSSLUCID employed datasets originating from Landscapes Between Eternities. They processed these through artificial neural networks, which are the computing systems fundamental to deep learning algorithms, which, as the name suggests, are inspired by models of the human brain. GANs, specifically, are a type of AI model that uses two neural networks, which compete with each other, to generate output.

“Normally, you need a big dataset, like a minimum of 10,000 images, to feed GANs so they can look for patterns and learn from them,” explains Zybura. “Of course, we didn’t have that. We initially had an extremely small dataset of 100 published images from the photobook. So we thought, ‘What would happen if we used test shots from our movement and texture studies as input?’ That’s when we decided to add around 200 images to the dataset that didn’t make it into the book or were error shots. From an artistic perspective, it was interesting to reveal so much of our creative process and include these behind-the-scenes images, but, for the GANs to be trained properly, it was also necessary.”

During the training period, which lasted about five months, the two data scientists sent CROSSLUCID a batch of new outcomes every couple of weeks. The artists observed that the initial rounds of portraits were abstract, barely resembling human forms. Although Zybura and Toth had to adhere to guidelines from the magazine publishers regarding the cover images’ compositions, they decided early on that it was important to let the training process unfold organically instead of trying to control the visual outcomes by driving it in a specific direction. 

“Ultimately, we didn’t want the final selection of images to reflect our aesthetic preferences,” says Zybura. “We were more interested in showing the mystery and unknowability inherent to the process of collaborating with GANs.”

Uncanny, diverse and appearing as if in perpetual motion, the 5000 images that currently compose Landscapes reminds us that AI is far from neutral. Indeed, many functioning neural networks don’t reflect the newest research or acknowledge that learning also happens beyond the brain. “The outcome of these AI models is completely related to their input,” says Toth, “To some extent, they can teach us about ourselves, our biases and the existing structures that govern our lives. We keep coming back to the outcomes – almost daily – interacting with them, reflecting on them and learning from their various shades and textures.” 

CROSSLUCID veers away from much of the discourse that conceptualises AI as a threat to humanity. Instead, the collective sees these emerging technologies as a part of the human ecosystem that can help us envision new possibilities of living and being in an ever-evolving landscape. 

@crosslucid

Coggin is a trained theatre-maker. From a young age, he was informed by teachers such as the late Rhea Gaisner to be conscious of one’s sensory experience of the world and to embrace the “full aliveness of being”. “My big takeaway from Gaisner was to be more attuned, but in the last year, with the pandemic and the compulsory mask, there was so much trauma on the street. I found myself plugging all my

senses to go grocery shopping,” he reflects. Coggin paid close attention to the ritual of donning the mask and the awkward struggle to position it comfortably. “The ear has to bear glasses, adornments and headphones,” he continues. “We’ve now had to add masks to the list of responsibilities. This already fragile organ feels under attack.”

Evident in his Clavicle Studies, Year of the Ear, and an upcoming project on the male nude, the rigour of cataloguing multiple versions of the same subject is a generative framework for Coggin. “I’m seeking adornment in service of the specificity of character,” he says. “I look at the world like theatre, and I’m looking for types. I want you to look at the ear and connect the dots between class, occupation, gender preference, generation, and so on. When you get tight on a detail of a person, the variety is infinite.” Beyond its initial read, Year of the Ear is a portrait of social healing. Coggin is chronicling how we armour ourselves to go into the world; to find normalcy, in whatever guise that takes, and renew our sense of hope for a future unknown.

alexandercoggin.com

One of the constant themes throughout Steyerl’s oeuvre is the question of how images generate our idea of “reality” and the use and abuse of this for political ends and propaganda purposes. Forms of the essayistic documentary film have compelled the artist since the beginning of her intellectual activity, and she has worked with directors like Alexander Kluge and Harun Farocki. Additionally, she is a professor of New Media Art at Berlin University of the Arts and publishes prolifically on topics related to her artistic research. 

Steyerl’s recent texts and films investigate how the digital image is part of a specific economic regime that produces desires, exchanges, and dependencies. Her essay, titled Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, focuses on the spatial dimension and the frightening omnipresence of the Internet and its image circulation. In Steyerl’s opinion, we have long since entered into a new paradigm – a space of no return – a free-flowing system of circulation that circumscribes and influences everything from personal identities and romantic relationships to political debates and public advocacy. She asserts: “The Internet persists offline as a mode of life, surveillance, production and organization […] It is obviously completely surveilled, monopolized, and sanitized by common sense, copyright, control, and conformism.”

Playing with the fluidity of the digital image, which crosses the border from the virtual to the “real” museum space, is one of Steyerl’s main visual strategies in the exhibition at Centre Pompidou. The show becomes a highly physical experience that confronts visitors with image, sound, and information while also guiding them through complex architectural structures. 

The ambitious exhibition begins with the installation Hell Yeah Fuck We Die (2016). Based on the five most common words used in English-language song titles from the previous decade (hell, yeah, we, fuck, and die), the display combines three video screens with robot sculptures, neon signs and hammering techno sound. The videos feature a compilation of images from robot technology testing labs collected from various online sources, in which humanoid robots are subject to abuse, both actual and simulated. 

The show continues with Steyerl’s latest multimedia installation SocialSim (2020), which she partly produced during the pandemic lockdown. It critically explores the potential of digitality, simulation, and artificial intelligence and locates the visitors in the middle of an immersive VR space with dancing police and military men, projecting prognoses of energy consumption, riots, suicide rates, and rates of infection — a fierce comment on the social upheavals during the pandemic. 

Elsewhere, the three-channel video installation Mission Accomplished: Belanciege (2019) places audiences before screens sitting in architectural structures, which refer to the European parliament. The video lectures and the setting reflect on politics, culture and populism, exploring the relationship between data mining, the fall of the Berlin Wall, autocracy in old Soviet territories and luxury fashion brand Balenciaga. Meanwhile, the installation HOW NOT TO BE SEEN (2013) also follows this critical approach through a humorous video tutorial, which centres around achieving invisibility in a world full of images. The work invites viewers to take up benches echoing calibration targets, as used for military surveillance backgrounds.

Steyerl’s attention to architectural and exhibition design reflects the social power relationships that spaces can articulate. Her installations provide an opportunity to observe new media technologies like virtual reality differently. They interrupt a single reading of online worlds. Instead, they engender analytical handling of digital images by questioning the “truth” that media images claim to depict. Indeed, the art experience in the museum’s spaces becomes increasingly important, providing opportunities to reflect and experience digital art differently from the “lonely” consumption of online worlds at home. Although we may be tired of digital encounters, the exhibition reminds us of why we must remain critical and alert in a post-factual world.

Hito Steyerl. I will survive is on show at Centre Pompidou until 05 July 2021.

Minnesota Street Project

minnesotastreetproject.com
@minnesotastreetproject

After years of impoverished artists leaving and galleries shutting up shop in San Francisco, Minnesota Street Project opened in the city in 2016. “We started MSP with a strong commitment to using our spaces and programming as a means to build bridges between the Bay Area’s visual arts community and the community as a whole,” explains Andy Rappaport, who together with his wife Deborah envisioned and founded the arts enterprise. Situated across three renovated warehouses in the Dogpatch district, MSP offers affordable spaces for galleries, artists and arts-related nonprofits. The architectural design marries vestiges of each building’s industrial past with light-filled, airy and modern studios. In the public atrium, lectures, nonprofit fundraisers and events such as the annual SF Art Book Fair regularly take place.

MSP is an essential destination for anyone with an interest in contemporary art. There are 13 fine art galleries (in addition to rotating pop-ups), presenting work by the likes of Dawoud Bey, Jim Goldberg, Anouk Kruithof, Richard Mosse, Vik Muniz, Trevor Paglen, Sara VanDerBeek and Awoiska van der Molen, among many others. Located up the road at the 25th Street compound, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts is not to be missed.  Since opening in 2017, its diverse exhibitions have included Michael Jang’s California, Isaac Julien’s impactful Lessons of the Hour, and Orlando, the travelling Aperture exhibition curated by Tilda Swinton.

One building (not open to the public) houses private studios for over 40 visual artists, including locals Sean McFarland, Klea McKenna, Marcela Pardo Ariza and Richard T Walker, all of whom work with the photographic medium. For photographer Erica Deeman, having her studio at MSP has “made it easier to let my work breathe, giving room to understand the nuances of my connections and creations. Most importantly, it has allowed me to forge deep connections with other Black creatives, forming community and a strong support network.”

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Harvey Milk Photo Center
In operation for over 75 years, the Harvey Milk Photo Center houses the oldest and largest community wet darkroom in the US, in addition to a full digital lab and regular classes, workshops, lectures and exhibitions.

Adrian Martinez

@berlinbrrr

“When I first visited San Francisco, I was captivated by the unique and welcoming culture – particularly its arts and music scenes, and the skateboarding and zine communities,” photographer and Los Angeles native Adrian Martinez recalls. In 2008, he relocated to San Francisco for school and never looked back.

“Initially, my practice was fuelled by learning about San Francisco’s deep photo history,” Martinez explains. Local photographers such as Janet Delaney, Michael Jang, Mimi Plumb and his frequent collaborator and good friend, Austin Leong, have all inspired him. He also cites the importance of the late Bay Area photographer Henry Wessel. Wessel’s ability to blend the playful and poignant resonates in Martinez’s pictures. 

Since 2015, Martinez has been photographing around Stow Lake, the largest body of water in San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Park. Visitors’ understated interactions with other park-goers, the natural landscape and the wildlife characterise this body of work, as does a kind of unresolved tension contained within each picture’s frame. 

Like the majority of artists living in the Bay Area, Martinez wears several hats in addition to being a photographer. He serves as an administrator in the photography department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and in 2016 co-founded illetante collective, a small publishing imprint which has released 25 titles, including three focusing on his own projects. “I feel lucky to be a part of it all,” he says. “All my experiences have solidified a desire to continue developing projects with and alongside the many brilliant photographers and artists who live here.”

Pier 24 Photography

pier24.org
@pier24photography

Located on San Francisco’s Embarcadero directly beneath the Bay Bridge, Pier 24 Photography is one of the – if not the – largest spaces devoted to photography in the world. And in this age of ever-increasing museum admission fees, entrance here is free of charge. The 28,000 square foot space opened to the public in spring 2010 and curates its large-scale exhibitions from the Pilara Foundation Collection, which is comprised of over 5000 photographs assembled by San Francisco native Andrew Pilara and his wife, Mary. Previous exhibitions have examined longstanding tropes in the medium – such as portraiture and the landscape – in addition to more timely explorations, including the intersection of photography and appropriation, and the social and cultural fabric of contemporary America. 

Drawing inspiration from the meditative experiences at institutions like the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, Pier 24 Photography admits a limited number of people during two-hour appointment sessions. This fosters a quiet, contemplative experience and gives visitors the rare opportunity to often find themselves alone in a room of photographs. Viewers engage with the images on their own terms – context or other interpretive information is confined to a printed guide, enabling viewers to choose when to consult these details. This kind of experience can be intimidating at first, but often proves more meaningful as viewers intimately engage with the pictures on walls devoid of wall text.

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Green Apple Books
Just down the block from Park Life, Green Apple Books is one of the best bookstores in the city. A decent selection of new and used photobooks are available on the second floor.

SF Art Book Fair

sfartbookfair.com
@sfartbookfair

“The San Francisco Art Book Fair originated from the idea of bringing a version of Printed Matter’s NY and LA Art Book Fairs to the city,” explains the co-founder, Jamie Alexander. On the inaugural night of SFABF, at 1275 Minnesota Street in 2016, the space was packed as a queue snaked around the block. “There was definitely a ‘where have all these people been?’ moment,” Alexander remembers. 

Since then, this multiday festival, normally held annually in July, has continued to expand and thrive. Co-organised by Colpa Press, Park Life and Minnesota Street Project, this free event grew from around 70 exhibitors and 7500 attendees in 2016, to 110 exhibitors and 10,000 attendees in 2019. The fair aims to highlight the Bay Area’s varied art publishers while engaging national and international art-book publishers with the local community. Photography-specific exhibitors range from California-based publishers like Deadbeat Club, The Ice Plant and Nazraeli Press to those further afield including Aperture, J&L Books, Here Press, Kris Graves Projects and Mörel Books. Countless signings, book launches, screenings, panel discussions and artist talks are scheduled throughout the weekend. And since SFABF takes place at Minnesota Street Project, many, if not all, of the galleries there participate with tables of publications, book-related exhibitions, or other related programming. 

When the 2020 edition was cancelled due to the pandemic, the organisers made a timely pivot. In lieu of the event they offered the 2020 SFABF Publishing Grant, which was awarded to 15 nominated BIPOC publishers.

SF Camerawork

sfcamerawork.org
@sfcamerawork

The not-for-profit SF Camerawork was founded in 1974 with the mission of promoting emerging photographers and encouraging diverse approaches to the medium; Hal Fischer, Donna-Lee Phillips and Lew Thomas – three influential conceptual photographers of the period – were among those involved in establishing the cooperative organisation. SF Camerawork fearlessly mounted early-career solo exhibitions for Joel-Peter Witkin (1982), Allan Sekula (1985), Uta Barth (1994), Todd Hido (1997), Gregory Halpern (2007) and Meghann Riepenhoff (2016), just a few of the exhibited artists that are now well-known names. It has organised compelling (and, in some cases, prescient) thematic exhibitions about photography in California, photomontage, identity politics, and digital photography. Over the years, it has prioritised collaborations with local education institutions, including California College of the Arts, City College, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco State University. It also hosts monthly members’ critiques, regular artist lectures and discussions, workshops, and an annual juried exhibition.

While the gallery was closed during lockdown, the nonprofit expanded its online programme with artist talks, panels and digital shows. Once reopened, it will exhibit the Chicago-based artist Aimée Beaubien’s site-specific work, Matter in the Hothouse. Beaubien is the inaugural recipient of the SF Camerawork Exhibition Award, which includes a $5000 project grant. 

On our radar

Chanell Stone
Last year, Chanell Stone had her first museum solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (located in San Francisco) and was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the recently established Black (Space) Residency, based at Minnesota Street Project.

Daniel Postaer
Daniel Postaer’s poignant body of work, Boomtown, explores San Francisco’s profound evolution over the past decade.

TBW Books

@tbwbooks

At California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA), Paul Schiek studied under Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan. “There were classes dedicated specifically to photobook-making, which were life-changing for me,” he says. In 2006, Schiek founded TBW Books, an independent publishing imprint based in Oakland. His first project included four similarly designed and formatted books, each devoted to a different photographer’s work. “While each book is unique, they are designed and edited to work together in conveying a cohesive visual theme,” he writes on TBW’s website. He has since published six more of these Annual Series collections – which regularly sell out – with volumes dedicated to Viviane Sassen, Alec Soth, Mark Steinmetz, Wolfgang Tillmans and Carmen Winant. 

TBW’s publishing itinery has grown to include thoughtful, tightly edited and well-crafted monographs, from both lesser-known and established photographers, a number of whom are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Titles from the past five years include: Carolyn Drake’s Knit Club, Ken Light’s Midnight La Frontera, Mimi Plumb’s Landfall, Gus Powell’s Family Car Trouble, and Ayu No Kaze by Asako Shimazaki.

When asked what inspires him to continue making photobooks, Schiek replies, “I have what can only be called an addiction to photography and to books. So while it honestly makes no sense on a practical level, I don’t have a choice but to keep making them.”