February 4 - March 18, 2000

The James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography is a biennial award administered by SF Camerawork and The San Francisco Foundation, given in recognition of artistic achievements by California-born artists. Established by the Trust of James D. Phelan, former San Francisco Mayor, United States Senator and arts supporter, the annual competition makes awards in a variety of disciplines.

The 1999/2000 winners are Timothy Harvey, Ron Jude, and Carol Selter. Honorable mentions include Jason Francisco, Deborah Hammond, and Laurie Long.

The 1999/2000 jurors are Diana Gaston, former Curator at the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and Ada Takahashi, Director of the Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco.

May 16 - June 24, 2000

Dennis Begg
Jim Campbell
Bruce Cannon
Kathryn Dunlevie
Judy Gelles
Michael Henderson
Barrett Langlinais
Tongsue Ly
Cheryl Sue Owen

Timekeepers brings together a diverse group of contemporary artists exploring the notions of measuring, stopping, keeping, and warping time. The exhibition examines the ways that the past is recorded in both material and immaterial ways, as in Judy Gelles’s serial portraits for her family and Dennis Begg’s installation of found images re-presented. Other work considers time’s warp and woof, playing in the intersection of past, present, and future, sometimes looping them together as in Jim Campbell’s video installation Signature. Other artists’ work investigates the measurement of time, such as Bruce Cannon’s Reflection, which measures time’s passage through the changing image of the artist’s face in daily video snapshots. A "timely" exhibition for the new millennium, Timekeepers offers a new twist on that which we take for granted: with our culture moving ever faster, our experience of time is revealing itself as infinitely malleable.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Spring/Summer 2000, Vol. 27, No. 1
Timekeepers

July 5 - August 12, 2000

Marc Asnin
Christian Cravo
Adriana Groisman
Andrew Moore
Shehzad Noorani
Joseph Ouma
Raghubir Singh

The 2000 Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Award and Lifetime Achievement Award celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography.

The 2000 winners are:

Marc Asnin (USA) - awarded the top prize, the Medal of Excellence ($7,000), for Uncle Charlie, a documentary twenty years in the making, focusing on the life and family of the artist’s schizophrenic uncle. This photographic essay boldly tells the story of two generations dealing with mental illness, drug abuse, AIDS, and family dysfunction.

Shehzad Noorani (Bangladesh) - honored with $7,000 for Daughters of Darkness, an intimate look into the day-to-day lives and struggles of Bangladeshi prostitutes. In a society where prostitutes are seen only as objects of sex, this project portrays these women as mothers, sisters, lovers, and survivors.

Andrew Moore (UK) - recognized with $7,000 for Northern Ireland After the Cease-Fire, which focuses on the post-cease-fire struggles that continue around the Northern Irish "marching season." Since the 1994 IRA cease-fire, the situation shifts endlessly from joy to tragedy to tentative hope.

Joseph Ouma (Uganda) – recognized with $7,000 for The Control of HIV/AIDS in Uganda. From the first 17 cases reported in 1982, AIDS in Uganda has spread to threaten the lives of nearly 5% of the population. This project, inspired by the magnitude of human misery and its social and economic implications, intends to stimulate research and behavioral changes in the public.

Adriana Groisman (Argentina) – honored with $3,500 honored for Tango: The Dance of the Night, an intimate and sensuous look into the world of traditional Argentinean tango balls and the unique subculture of their patrons.

Christian Cravo (Brazil) - awarded a $3,500 grant for Sertão. The Sertão is a vast desert region in the northern part of Brazil, where the land is dry, distances are great, and access is difficult. This project documents the lives and beliefs of people whose religion and faith have enabled them to live since colonial times in one of Brazil’s poorest and harshest regions.

A Lifetime Achievement Award has also been given to honor Raghubir Singh (1943 - 1999) for his short but prolific career.

September 5 - October 7, 2000

Greg Bruce
Anthony Goicolea
Lori Nix
Melanie Willhide

untitled (conjecture) features constructed imagery which explores, in both playful and disturbing ways, the territory of fear, anxiety, and psychological disturbance. Greg Bruce’s lighthearted scenes of "tortured" flowers are undercut by the violence enacted upon them. He chops, ties, and butchers Gerbera daisies, with results at once both humorous and vicious. Similar in tone are Anthony Goicolea’s tableaux of adolescence schoolboy pranks, in which he plays all the characters. Running through the images is a latent sexual energy fueling the manic antics that ensue in his photographs. Lori Nix manifests her anxieties in artful recreations of disaster scenes. Filled with the looming drama of simple terror, the fear evoked in her images is overwrought and neurotic, reminiscent of 70s disaster films. Moving into darker realms, Melanie Willhide’s mysterious images subtly hint at hidden obsessions and sexual deviance without revealing explicit evidence. The "action" of her images is lost in ambiguity, suggesting an anonymous hermetic realm of unleashed fantasies one can only imagine. As conjecture fills the mind, the effect of these collected works is unsettling and uncomfortable.

October 17 - November 18, 2000

Democracy: The Last Campaign, an installation and web project (http://dtlc.walkerart.org), is the final installment in the collaborative team Crane/Winet’s ongoing exploration of the presidential election process. The project focuses on the spectacle and phenomenon of the 2000 presidential election and seeks to capture the political zeitgeist of the moment and the psycho-social dynamics of American public life at the fin-de-siècle. During the months leading up to the election, the artists observed and documented political activity and translated their research into a creative installation that incorporates photographic/text works, multimedia elements, and an online salon that functions as a forum for a national discussion of issues. Additionally, a range of public programs were designed in conjunction with the installation to raise awareness of election issues and to critically contextualize the election process.

View full descriptions and images and visit D-TLC's web site.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Fall/Winter 2000, Volume 27, No. 2
Democracy – The Last Campaign

December 10, 1999 - January 29, 2000

The Image After presents three artists exploring the idea of the eternal image which resonates through time. Danish artist Torben Eskerod photographs anonymous death masks of politicians, scientists, and writers, the makers of modern Denmark, from the collection of the Museum of National History at Frederiksberg Castle. These images expose the captured souls the masks embody with a vivid realism: the faces retain the tangible tactility of their flesh and appear so corporeal so as to appear to melt the line between life and death. Spanish photographer Joan Fontcuberta's series Constellations explores the photographic reflection of life past and present. His mysterious images of fabricated "constellations" consider the manufacturing of individual and collective memory and the scientific pretension of irrevocable proof. By means of satirical critique, Fontcuberta's images question our belief in the photograph as an irreproachable document. Italian artist Silvio Wolf's installation is based on projections of positive and negative images of the Shroud of Turin, which is, to the artist, a light-generated image. Wolfe investigates its immateriality, ambiguity, and uncertainty, creating images of both life and afterlife.