News

The SF Camerawork Benefit Auction 2021: The Roof Is on Fire will take place online with Artsy 
September 14 - 28th. 

This year’s auction will feature over 60 works by some of the world’s leading photographers and many of photography's most exciting emerging artists.

Over its 47-year history, SF Camerawork’s mission and programs have been dedicated to offering local artists early career opportunities toward the creation of their important work. This year's Benefit Auction raises crucial funds that directly support image makers, with contributing artists receiving up to 50% of the sale price for their works.

Link to bid on Artsy

Through August 24, 2021

Klea McKenna uses the photogram process to create unique gelatin silver prints that contain both vivid detail and ethereal abstraction. Unlike a photograph created with a camera, a photogram is a one-of-a-kind object that involves physical contact between a subject and the light-sensitive printing surface, representing the mark of that interaction. This exhibition is a curated selection of work from 4 different series, Rain Studies, Web Studies, Automatic Earth, and Generation.

Rain Studies are an ongoing series of unique gelatin silver photograms of rain made outdoors at night. McKenna began making these on the big Island in Hawaii, where rain is plentiful but continued them back home in California as it suffered through a period of severe drought.

Web Studies are unique gelatin silver photograms of rain caught in the webs of orb-weaver spiders. Remarkable feats of engineering built each day to catch prey, the webs are also delicate and damaged. Like the patterns found inside trees and in our own lives, the webs follow a particular form yet each is unique and exquisitely flawed.

In her series Automatic Earth, McKenna emphasizes the physicality of the photogram process and builds on it by forcing the paper to record texture as well as light. Working in near darkness she applies pressure on the center cut of a tree to physically imprint the texture into the photographic paper and then selectively exposes the paper to light creating what the artist calls a "photographic relief."

With Generation, McKenna applies this method to textiles and women's clothing from different cultures that are rich in the legacy of touch: from the labor of their making to the textures of the designs, to the marks of continual wear. For McKenna, her process "is driven by my desire for communication with women from a time and place different than my own...With each alteration, mending, and use, someone has inscribed themselves onto these textiles."

www.kmrarts.com

This Is Not a Fashion Photograph. Allen Frame

..."the pictures in Fever seem to draw upon an earlier influence: Italian postwar cinema, notably Michelangelo Antonioni. The looseness, spontaneity, and natural light in Frame’s work combines the immediacy of the snapshot with film’s wide-screen impact for a sense of emotional intimacy that’s contained but never cramped."

Link to article

A PHOTO COLLECTION THAT CAPTURES NEW YORK AT THE VERY DAWN OF AIDS

In 'FEVER,' Allen Frame's candid 1981 photos capture a time of hope and innocence—and they are all the more tragic for it

In a new book of color photographs, all shot in 1981, Allen Frame revisits a time that gave rise to an aesthetic that was distinctly New York. A circle of friends, many—though not all—gay men, made art at a specific moment in city’s history, though perhaps not what you’d expect.

Link to article

A Portrait of the New York Art Scene
Just Before the Advent of AIDS

A new book and exhibition revisit downtown New York in 1981 and capture the face of a lost generation just before the pandemic struck.

Frame’s photographs, which combine the immediacy of the snapshot with the timeless sensibilities of fine art, preserve the face of a lost generation. Here, we see a world filled with possibility and hope, the hallmarks of youth made all the more poignant by the sense that they cannot begin to imagine the terrors the future will hold.   

Link to article

In a simultaneous, in-person show at MATTE in Brooklyn, Frame is presenting a selection of images from Fever, along with a salon-style hanging of work from his collection of artists depicted in the book and recent work by some of them, including Frank Franca, Nan Goldin, Jody Guralnick, Kevin Teare, Ken Tisa, Jane Warrick, David Wilson and Zamba. Other photographs from the period by Sheyla Baykal, Robert Penner, Laurie Sagalyn, and Perry Walker are part of the salon-style presentation.


MATTE Editions HQ
1899 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11233
www.MATTEeditions.com

In my photographs there's an inherent reality that we see, real people in real situations, not actors in a film or play that I’m directing or writing. I acknowledge that reality, but of course, I shape it, with various decisions of framing, editing, sequencing. I want to acknowledge my subjectivity, too, my projections onto people and situations. What is exciting to me is the mixture of the two, the coming together of some "objective" reality and "subjective" experience. I title images with the actual subjects' names, the actual location, the actual date, but what seems to be going on in the photograph may not reflect the actual circumstances.

Link to article 

Showing Us the Light

For Khalik Allah, photography is a spiritual endeavor, a conscious marriage of street and self, a quest to elevate both. It is also inherently lyrical, and like a preacher improvising a sermon, a musician in the zone, or poet freestyling off the dome, there’s something mystical and transcendent in the execution. That’s not to say it isn’t firmly grounded in this reality, in the actuality of life at 125th and Lexington in Harlem where much of his work is focused. Cycles of addiction, poverty, and suffering haunt the darkness of this nightscape but the camera is an instrument beholden to the light.

Link to the Spring 2021 issue of the magazine.

online version of the article

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis
Curated by Corey Keller
March 6 – September 5, 2021

Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis brings together seven Bay Area artists ― Carolyn Drake, Rodney Ewing, Andres Gonzalez, James Gouldthorpe, Klea McKenna, Tucker Nichols, and Woody De Othello ― and their deeply personal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and social upheaval of 2020. Their projects emerged from the profound curtailing of daily life that resulted from shelter in place: the disruption of routines and the inaccessibility of studios or materials, the instability in employment, and the delicate and sometimes untenable balance struck between family needs and work obligations. These challenges demanded an adaptive way of working; rather than closing off opportunities, the constraints prompted new approaches and new lines of inquiry.

Individually, the artists demonstrate a startlingly wide range of artistic, emotional, and political responses, a reminder of how this unprecedented period affects each of us differently. Taken together, their work emphasizes our shared experience in this collective crisis.

link to SFMoMA

click below to read about Klea's installtion No Feeling Is Final, 2020

Khalik Allah’s latest film "IWOW: I Walk on Water", focuses on the artist’s longtime muse Frenchie, a 60-something schizophrenic, homeless Haitian man, who he becomes increasingly intertwined with. Allah, whose previous moving image work includes 2018’s "Black Mother", also turns the camera on himself to document a turbulent romantic relationship and grapple with personal notions of spirituality and mortality – all inquiries about which he gathers advice from charismatic confidants including Fab 5 Freddy, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and, in deeply moving exchanges, his own mother. On the motivations behind his image-making practice, Allah says “My objective hasn’t changed, it’s always been to keep it real with myself; to stay true to my vision and to have the courage to express it cinematically. "IWOW" is a sort of first-person documentary poem; a statement of my artistic integrity and my uncompromising dedication to the streets.”

link to trailer

Khalik Allah is featured in the new Spring 2021 issue of the magazine.