Tag: SFMOMA

Who is Michael Jang?

He spent 40 years documenting the street life and subcultures
of the Bay Area, but
kept his work hidden. Discovered by SFMoMA in 2001, Michael Jang’s vast archive now forms
a new book and his first major retrospective, giving a rare insight into his wayward career

18 October 2019

What makes a good photograph?

A new exhibition considers the relativity of photographic taste, and how something that is a mistake for one generation may become a success for the next

28 August 2019

Issue #7882: Street View

From the bustling cities in the work of Eamonn Doyle and Guy Tillim, to Mark Power’s survey of decaying American landscapes, and a collaboration between Clémentine Schneidermann, Charlotte James, and a group of children in South Wales – this month’s issue is dedicated to the idea of the street as a site of theatre and historical spectacle.

5 March 2019

Carolyn Drake’s collaborative project Internat

Carolyn Drake first visited Ukraine more than a decade ago, as part of a year-long Fulbright fellowship investigation of changing notions of gender in the former USSR. Coming of age at the end of the Cold War, and with preconceptions about the region, she “saw it as a chance to step out of my present frame of reference, as a way to look at the malleability and impermanence of beliefs,” she recalls. Searching for expressions of female identity in the West of the country, she met the hosts of a church-run orphanage, who directed her to an older institution nearby called Petrykhiv Internat. Tucked away in a forest on the outskirts of Ternopil, it was a state-run boarding house, where around 70 girls marked as ill or disabled had been sent to live. Labelled abnormal, they had been deemed unfit to live beyond the home’s towering walls. That first trip took place in 2006; eight years later, she returned, eager to find out what had become of the girls and their home. “I expected to show up and ask someone on the staff how I could find the girls,” she says. “But when I arrived, I found most of them were still there, now in their twenties.

26 February 2018

Walker Evans' love of the vernacular at SFMOMA's enormous retrospective

“There are two important things about this show,” says Clément Chéroux, senior curator of photography at SFMOMA. “First, the quantity of work – more than 300 photographs, quite a large selection, because we were able to get support from most of the big institutions – MOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, the Musée du Quai Branly and so on, and private collections from around the world. Second, is the fact that it is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Usually when you look at important retrospectives they are chronological, but we organised by theme because we wanted to organise it around Evans’ passion for the vernacular. He was fascinated with vernacular culture.”

5 October 2017