February 3rd – May 31st, 2024 Opening Reception: Saturday, February 3rd, 5-7:00 PM To make the pictures in Meadowlark, Ian Bates spent years driving the vast, sparsely-populated spaces of the American West, often sleeping in his car. This is a project borne of both passion and patience, and though Bates was initially inspired by the […]
Library of Congress Exhibition Curated by: Stuart Schwart August 7 – September 29, 2023 Current Gallery Exhibition The Library of Congress website is a fascinating place to look through historic images. With it’s enormous photographic archive, one can spend countless hours on historic journeys traveling through the United States and worldwide. Many now famous […]
Photographer and collage artist Ken Graves is best known for his black-and-white street photography of San Francisco at the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s. Graves passed away earlier this year at the age of 74, leaving behind a legacy of more than 50 years of work. Almost two dozen pieces are part of SFMOMA’s permanent collection, and now the Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco has put together a new exhibition, The Home Front, to pay tribute to this great California artist.
Don Whitebread owns a decent telescope but admits he’s not much of an astronomer. He bought the telescope to do astrophotography, and then realized it didn’t give him the opportunity to play with time in the way he’d imagined.
“The work I’m doing, I feel like I’m capturing a particular moment. It’s a long moment, but still, it’s a moment in time when these stars happen to line up with this foreground and it creates a composition,” he said.
The work he’s referring to is part of an ongoing collection called Starlight. He shoots mostly with a medium-format Hasselblad and black and white film—digital cameras don’t allow for the type of exposure he’s after. Each exposure requires an exposure of around an hour and a half. The result is a glimpse of thousands of stars moving across the night sky.
Scott Orazem studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in California. He spent fifteen years shooting fashion in Los Angeles before launching a second career in creative direction and brand strategy. Now, Scott is exploring the personal side of his photography with a focus on patterns, textures, and scales found in nature.
After 25 years in the workforce, Jay Ruland decided to go back to school and, not surprisingly, found himself surrounded by 20-somethings. While he says he was welcomed by his junior contemporaries, he was struck by the way they perceive the world; that is, the things they found to be beautiful also tended to be as young as they were. As a 50-something, Jay says the aging process is beautiful in itself, and the desire to show that is the basis for his Withering Roses floral photography series, which will be featured in his new solo exhibition at The Image Flow As the Allure Fades opening on May 14.
“The younger students sort of had a bias toward things in society that are young and pretty, and we’re taught through the media that younger is better. But if you look closer in nature, things that are getting older are still beautiful and the process itself is a beautiful process,” says Jay.
He chose to work with roses because they are a societal symbol for beauty, something you’d give on a first date or use to decorate your house, but also because they can communicate ideas, from the number you give to the color, and transgress cultural barriers.
Annie Leibovitz, a San Francisco Art Institute alum, began her famed career as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone in the early 1970s. Over the past 40 years, she has created some of the most stunning and most controversial photographs of her day. Her new exhibition Women: New Portraits now on display at the Presidio’s Building 649 at Chrissy Field features portraits of some the world’s most influential women, from ballerina Misty Copeland to anthropologist Jane Goodall to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Stuart Schwartz and Jock McDonald led a group of American photographers to Cuba for a week of shooting. The week started in Miami. Stuart Schwartz and Jock McDonald met their six workshop participants in a hotel the night before the flight to Cuba. The group spanned more than five decades in age and as many shooting styles.
“My chief concern was, are these people going to get along?” says Stuart. “It was a big cross-section of participants, but it was a harmonious group of people, they were a family. It was a family trip.”
I’ve been to a banquet—Hendrik Paul’s new show at The Image Flow, Light From Within. It’s a show with crescendos of excitement and photographs that grant the viewer entry into the personal vision of an emerging voice. There are some many faceted gems here. As with any emerging photographer, about one third of the show consists of classic image making. Though masterful, as classic uses of composition, light, tonal value, subject matter, etc., they are images that don’t add anything new to the vocabulary of photography and don’t clear his unique voice. However, these are silenced by the majority of the show, which consists of images that not only add words and phrases to photography’s vocabulary, but also employ these additions to convey stories of genuine seeing.
