A new wave of photographers marks the 50th anniversary of SF Camerawork – a San Francisco gallery dedicated to innovation behind the lens. Each year an esteemed jury selects and showcases work of emerging image-makers who address current movements, trends and concerns. This year’s FORECAST programme saw winners selected by Bay Area art community leaders Maggie Dethloff and Rea Lynn De Guzman from a total of 160 international submissions. The 2024 lineup includes Takming Chuang, Lynse Cooper (Jurors’ Prize Awardee), Tiago Da Cruz, Jesse Egner, Nina Tanujaya and Vanessa Woods. These creatives are championing discovery, experimentation and new ideas through the camera.
The formation of SF Camerawork back in 1974 started a new wave in West Coast photography. Together, Donna Lee-Phillips, Lew Thomas and Hal Fischer channelled their respective talents into a community project. An emphasis on experimental techniques, socio-political themes and contemporary dialogues remain at the core of their output. For the last 45 years, the collective has been a launching pad for artists, supplying financial support, exhibition space, curation and patronage. FORECAST is an ongoing series that speaks to a wider movement within the photography world where initiatives are identifying and platforming up-and-coming artists. Well-known examples include those run by Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (FoAM) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. This has given practitioners a jumping off point, introducing the world to the works from John Chiara, Binh Danh, Erica Deeman, Jennifer Karady, and Meghann Riepenhoof – who will all be presenting their first West Coast exhibitions in the gallery.
FORECAST 2024 engages with an array of themes and techniques – from deconstructions of the maternal body to self-reflexive commentaries of queer identity. Vanessa Woods assembles collages from a range of sources – including academic books, personal photographs and modern magazines – decontextualising the original image and recontextualising its meaning through new associations. Her current body of work, Vestiges (2017-), explores the remaking of one’s body and mind through the process of becoming a mother. For this reason, Woods uses iterative techniques that involve remixing, rebuilding and reassembling the body through layering and fragmentation. In the finished work, photography and the body function as timekeepers. The photographer states: “the viewer might see photographic fragments of my children’s hands from different months in time, swaths of unblemished young skin, and a cast sliver of my ageing hand.” In turn, Woods assembles a multi-layered and surreal portrait of motherhood.
Elsewhere, the works of Brooklyn-based Jesse Egner exist between reality and fantasy. His playful compositions often invoke the spontaneity, collaboration and “absurdity” of modern queer identity. Self-portraiture is frequently used to reflect the fluidity of identity, subverting the rejection of “non-normative” body types that the artist experienced when using gay dating apps. For this reason, his works take a candid approach when photographing subjects in everyday environments, looking toward the vibrant and often overlooked queer communities found outside major city centres. In turn, these images cultivate queer collaboration. This is exemplified in the teasing intimacy of Hidden (2023, where subjects crouch beneath bedsheets beneath the desert sunset. The final image revels in the transitional spaces of queerness, defying the sexualised gaze in favour of a more spontaneous form of play.
SF Camerawork, FORECAST 2024 | Until 7 September.
Words: Kyle Boulton
Image Credits:
- Jesse Egner, Hidden, 2023.
- Vanessa Woods, Floating Construction, 2023.
- Nina Tanujaya, my parents, from “Pulang” series 2023.
