Photofairs San Francisco
Photofairs San Francisco, the annual fair featuring American and European photography, with strong holdings of Japanese, Mexican, South African, and Chinese artists, concluded yesterday at Ft. Mason, San Francisco. The fair was co-produced by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Over 30 galleries and museums were represented. A visitor to the fair spent two hours there yesterday, making these notes:
1. Sometimes the things that we think are least interesting about ourselves are the most interesting to others. When a photograph of a person, a portrait, actually becomes art it reveals this phenomenon like no other art.
2. Perhaps Trump should crack down on artists the way he's cracking down on immigrants (the wall, the proposed travel ban) the assumption being that there are far too many artists in the world, many more than the world can possibly tolerate.
3. Mandy Barker, an environmental photographer whose 'Soup' series features detritus pulled from world oceans, also displayed objects she'd found in the harbor near Cork, Ireland in a glass case. Among them were 4 cigarette lighters, a yellow comb, plastic and metal bottletops, an electric toothbrush, a plastic spoon, several pen caps, a pacifier, the number 5 (presumably one of those plastic address numbers one affixes to the front of one's house) and various other small plastic toys and doodads. Barker claimed to have found these objects in less than an hour.
4. Was that Boz Skaggs at the Scott Nichols Gallery? Or Huey Lewis? It was one or the other, I'm sorry I couldn't be sure.
5. Why does the iconic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe look so dated and the iconic photography of Dorothea Lange look so new, so fresh, when there's 30, 40, 50 years of time and space between them, Lange's being the much older work? I wish I knew the answer, but am glad to have something like this to think about.
6. Conceptual art, once so groundbreaking, thrilling, exciting etc. etc. now seems like an old standby. Standing underneath Naoya Hatakeyama's series of lamp-lit hotel rooms in Rome, Bangkok, Milano et. al. in which the rooms are all slightly different by the light cast by the lamp is pretty much the same, I am thrilled again, conceptually.
7. The difference between black and white and color photography, and not just that one's black and white and one's color? My best explanation: while mindlessly channel-surfing TV the odds are that I will stop channel-surfing when I come upon black and white more often than I do when I come upon color. Color is the new normal, and we art lovers aren't looking for normal.
8. Bill Jacobson. Billjacobsonstudio.com
9. The world does not need another photograph of a trailer park, or retro 1950 motels along Route 66, but there are some mornings when I need to take a photograph of my of myself to prove that I exist.
10. #10 is devoid of content I'm afraid; by the time I got to #9 my eyes had started watering.