January 3 – March 22, 2008

Since 1998, Japanese artist Katsushige Nakahashi has devoted himself to large-scale sculptural projects that investigate the narratives of World War II and the significance of memory. For The Depth of Memory, Nakahashi investigates history, war, and memory with the construction of a life-size Kaiten submarine in the gallery of SF Camerawork. After painstakingly photographing the entire surface of a toy model Kaiten at 1:32 scale, producing more than 20,000 photographs, the artist oversaw 150 volunteers as they assembled a 50-foot simulacrum of the infamous "suicide submarine" in SF Camerawork’s gallery. Says co-curator Kerner, “His work is specifically about personal memory of a catastrophic event and finding those stories that are not organized around generals, presidents, and emperors. Through that connection to specific memories, he provides an opportunity for us to connect in a more vital and spirited way to history.”

This exhibition is made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Columbia Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Fall/Winter 2007, Vol. 34, No. 2
Katsushige Nakahashi

April 3 – May 24, 2008

Jenny Vogel repurposes appropriated imagery from personal webcams and low-contrast surveillance cameras to create a pensive and poetic take on distance and desire. Set to an abstract narrative of unrequited love and composed primarily of low-resolution images, her video work resembles the dark and moody quality of early film, dramatizing the romantic tone.

April 3 – May 24, 2008

Through the generosity of Glenn and April Bucksbaum of The Baum Foundation, The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers awards a $10,000 cash grant to honor a talented and innovative photographer. The 2008 winner is Mike Brodie, a 22-year old photographer currently living in Philadelphia, who documents the train-hopping youth of America. He describes his subjects as "one of the most important, overlooked, and temporary underground cultures of modern times." For more information about this award and The Baum Foundation, please visit www.thebaumfoundation.org.

April 3 – May 24, 2008

Pablo Pijnappel
Liz Steketee
Melanie Willhide

Photography has long shouldered the burden of memory and, in some conceptual practices, has entangled itself with a complicated relationship to appropriation. The artists in Past is an image we form in the present exert control over the perception of memory through their work in literal and metaphorical ways, exploiting the vernacular aesthetic. The conceptual underpinnings of their manufactured images point toward a certain historical revisionism that reveal dormant or desired histories.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Fall/Winter 2008, Vol. 35, No. 2
Past is an image we form in the present

June 5 – August 23, 2008

For their Liu Li Tun series, Chinese artist RongRong and his Japanese wife inri created photographs depicting the nurturing environment of Liu Li Tun, an old Beijing neighborhood of traditional courtyard houses and hutongs (small alleyways), and the formative role it played in their life together before it was demolished as part of the city’s massive redevelopment program. They also memorialized the destruction of Liu Li Tun in a series of photographs of its ruins, often posing singly or together in many of the images. The poignant and romantic drama that runs as a thread through much of their collaborative œuvre finds a somber and elegant expression in this series that signifies the end of an era.

This exhibition is funded by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Columbia Foundation.

June 5 – August 23, 2008

In his series Sunburn, San Francisco-based photographer Chris McCaw turns the subject of his work, the sun, into an active participant in the printmaking process, creating prints that are literally burned by the path of the sun. The body of work was the result of a happy accident. Intending to create an all night exposure of the stars while camping, McCaw failed to wake up before sunrise. He discovered that while the night’s exposure had been destroyed, an interesting phenomenon had occurred on the film base, which had a hole burnt through it from the intense rays of the rising sun.

This exhibition is funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

June 5 – August 23, 2008

This historical exhibition examines the social and cultural conditions affecting the life and work of Alan B. Stone, a gay photographer who worked prolifically in Montreal, Canada from the 1950s to the 1970s. Celebrated historian and curator David Deitcher, who also grew up in Montreal, presents Stone's work as a means of exploring some of the ways in which people subjectively experience, use, and are affected by photographs.

September 4 – November 1, 2008

Through a series of participatory multi-media performance events and ongoing interactions in the gallery, this dynamic exhibit evolves as artists and audience collude to turn SF Camerawork into a participatory space and to blur the boundaries between art maker, viewer and media. The exhibition includes a number of significant new performance works commissioned specifically for this project by artists Roger Sayre, Tim Sullivan, Guillermo Gómez-Peña with Violeta Luna and colleagues from La Pocha Nostra, Second Front, and Oliver Herring with multiTASK. The art works presented depend upon the viewers’ active participation, and as the audience interacts with each piece, the projects grow to amass new photographic and digital images related to the encounter, forming a cumulative record of viewer experiences.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Spring/Summer 2009, Vol. 36, No. 1
Make Me