Pier 24

The other day I visited Pier 24, and utterly amazing "place to view and think about photography." It's also a very mysterious spot. Since it opened a year or so ago it seems hardly to have been publicized at all. Some San Franciscans, myself included, seem to have vaguely heard of it, and many not at all. And yet it's huge in scale--more along the lines of a small museum than an art gallery. And the caliber of work they're showing is outstanding. And while the perception seems to be that you can go there by invitation only, in fact it's by appointment only. Anyone can go, and it's free, and the appointments take about five seconds to make online (though, just to make things a little more cagey and odd, you can only make appointments for one person at a time--if you want to go with a group you each have to make your own separate appointment). And they only let in twenty people at a time, and did I mentioned that it's huge? so you more or less have the whole place to yourself for two hours. And when you get there it's almost totally unmarked from the outside and a security camera looks you in the eyeballs before you are let in. So basically what we have here is a semi-secret free museum of amazing, and I do mean amazing, photography. That almost no one seems to know about. Weird, right? And kind of wonderful? Anyhow, enough chatter. The current show (up through February and highly recommended) is on portraiture. And here are shots I took on site to capture the images that struck me most.

The above nude is by Edward Weston (of all people!).

Nicholas Nixon's Brown Sisters (I love love love this series and was so happy to see this one there, like an old friend)  

A group of Retratos Pintados (hand-tinted portraits from Mexico)

Vintage photo by August Sander (I'm a secret big believer in the concept of affinity. Because of that I feel absolutely certain this woman and I would be friends). 

Another August Sander (it seems to me it's rare to see vintage images of women who look happy holding babies, which makes it all the more awesome when you do). 

Hendrik Kerstens (this is the cover image for the excellent About Face exhibition catalog which they are selling there, though seemingly no place else, for the bargain price of ten bucks).

Hans-Peter Feldmann (these are the first and last images in a series that encircles a room, featuring a portrait of a different person for each year of life starting at 0, 1, 2, 3, etc, all the way up to 100).

Diane Arbus (I almost missed a whole room of amazing Arbus images because I didn't see the tiny doorway--that's how big this place is).

Gillian Wearing "Self Portrait as My Mother" (and...wait for it...)

Gillian Wearing "Self Portrait as My Father" (Ok, ok, I know, I know. Just like how it was deeply uncool in English Lit grad school to "read for the plot," you're not supposed to marvel at the costumed trickery of self-portrait photographers. I get it. No one wants to be caught in public exclaiming "Oh my god! Cindy Sherman looks just like a Florida retiree in that photo!" We're all so much more sophisticated than that, right? But I'm sorry. It has to be said: female artist Gillian Wearing's cross-dressing in the above image is astounding, right? I mean, come on!)

The Next Entry in the Ongoing Series of Poems About The Winter of 2005

December 15, 2005
I used to see a girl

As I walked to work
maybe one morning out of five

Pretty
with lots of yellow blonde highlights
all over the top of her hair
I did not like her
She struck me as simultaneously self-satisfied
and demeaned
often walking
as she did
with a boring looking older man
who talked and talked
as she grinned at him
Nor did I like her overly polished outfits

But then
a couple of weeks ago
I saw her alone
looking
frankly
stricken
Such a sad face
a completely different face
an I-cried-myself-to-sleep-at-three-in-the-morning face
I imagined a bad break up
or a death
perhaps with or of
the blowhard balding man in the suit
And I found myself feeling bad for her

But the thing is
I haven’t seen her since
And I find that this concerns me
Impossible to track how long it’s been
since that last time we passed in the street
but a while now I’m pretty sure
More than a couple of weeks

And I hope she’s ok
Hope she’s established a new morning routine
(stopped spending the night at old dude’s house for instance)

Turns out you get attached to what recurs
Even in the absence of liking


image source is here

Book/Shop

A photographer whose work I'm quite partial to is Brian Ferry of The Blue Hour. The other day he featured a series of images about a pop-up shop put on by Book/Shop at New York men's store C'H'C'M. Not only are Ferry's shots of the set-up and actualization of this retail installation quite fantastic, but I was also excited to discover the existence of Book/Shop, which I'd never heard of before and which, it turns out, is actually a San Francisco-based purveyor of vintage books, art, and bookish furnishings like little bookshelves and even paper cleaner.

England My England

Fifteen years ago I spent my junior year in college at Oxford. This week my father dug up and scanned some photos from that time (the first two from visits to London during the Tremendously Cold winter), the rest from a two-week trip round the countryside he and I took when my academic year ended) and posted them on his own fine blog here and here. Because they are images of my own face I feel free to steal them with impunity.

Of course the very first thing I thought when I saw them after all this while is easy to guess: I was so YOUNG!! The way we all always are astonished by the fact of our own previous youth. But the very next thought I had might (or might not) be harder to surmise.

It was: why did I dress like a man? I remember most of these clothes very well. The wooly faux-Russian hat, the biker jacket, the college scarf, the men's white v-neck undershirts, the huge cargo pants and sweatshirts, the overalls, the male-rock-star sunglasses. Hell, I even remember liking these clothes. 

And, ok, to be fair, most of the unruly shapes and proportions can be chalked up to it being the late 90s. From what I can recall I guess I was more or less on-trend with other girls in their early twenties at the time. I don't think I owned a skirt, but neither did any of my friends. 

No, ultimately it's not the mannish hugeness of my garments that really strikes me, it's the utter lack of color. I love color. Love it. These days if I'm not wearing at least two bright colors at any given moment I hardly feel like myself at all. And, until I saw these photos and was reminded of this other sartorial period in my life, I'd have sworn that's how I've always felt, practically since the day I was released from the drab plaid uniform of my Catholic grade school. 

I've indulged before, here, in showing pictures of a few of my crazy colorful outfits in high school. And it's almost hard to believe I went from those ensembles to these in a span of three years or so. But I think what happened was, I thought I was growing up. I mean, of course, I actually was growing up. But that's the thing about getting older. When it first starts to happen you look back on your younger self, don't you, and you think that the crazy things that made you happy must by definition be the trappings of childhood and therefore must be jettisoned by your new mature self.

I think I thought that this was how serious grown-ups dressed (and I suppose it was, if the serious grown-up in question happened to be a skater dude). Only when we get even older do we realize that the things which made us happy in youth might still make us happy in adulthood, and that, screw it, we're going to keep doing them. As Dr. Seuss puts it "These things are fun, and fun is good."

I include this last photo, even though it somewhat disproves my thesis with that coral-colored sweater, because it cracks me up that I look about twelve years old (though I was actually twenty-one), and I also like how happy I look. On a side note, did you know that if you lived in the UK for more than six months in 1997, which I did, you are not allowed to give blood for fifteen years, for fear of mad cow disease? I guess this means next year I'm in the clear and my brain won't be turning into a sponge after all. Hooray!

Tahoe!

Of course many people, indeed perhaps most people, view Lake Tahoe as a winter destination. But for me Tahoe in July, August, or even September--its blues and greens, its white mountain sunlight, its dry warm air--really epitomize a summer vacation vibe. In this picture Mabel plays a game she calls "bip!" in the foreground, while her daddy plays volleyball in the background.

Installation Art

As I scamper about among the art blogs, I've recently been finding myself especially drawn to installation art. I think the reasons for this will become apparent once I've shown you these three disparate, but all amazing, pieces. Above "Prismatic Vortex" by Amanda Browder, as seen on Brown Paper Bag.

Then there's "Giant Slugs" by Florentijn Hofman (yes, those really are humongous slugs formed from plastic bags, crawling up the steps of an ancient French town), which was brought to my attention by Beautiful Decay. 

And finally this installation of thousands of books and LED lights all over a street in Melbourne by the collective Luzinterruptus, also featured on Beautiful Decay (which, as you can perhaps guess, has been one of my favorite reads lately).

In Which the Long-Running Poem Series About the Winter of 2005 Proceeds at its Own Stately Pace

December 14, 2005
This morning’s fog utterly different from the day before’s

Yesterday
a great high mass of hard steely gray
sat up there
made all the light flat
and you could tell just by looking
it wasn’t going anywhere
the bank had settled in for the day

Today
a fine sheer wet silvery mist floating around in the sky
glowing from within and draping the tops of the buildings
Clearly as ephemeral as it was immediate and chilly
with an icy cold breeze that flew right in your face
but softly
and therefore bracingly rather than bone-chillingly

Around here
we need a lot more words for fog
like the Inuit are supposed to have for snow
(though I’ve heard that’s an urban legend)

image source is here