SF Camerawork, San Francisco, California
Continuing through April 22, 2025
February 22, 2025
“A Strange Vibration,” including Lenn Keller, Darcy Padilla and Elizabeth Sunflower, is comprised of three black and white photographers who have documented three decades of San Francisco communities. Each were differently impacted by and adapted to the sexual revolution. Situated alongside one another, a linear narrative unfolds amongst these works, one that not only reflects shifting moirés nationwide but also the latent effects of sustaining oneself on the fringes of capitalist heteronormality.
Like a point of origin, the work of Sunflower (1943-2008) kicks things off. Known for capturing iconic moments like Altamont, the Human Be-In and the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford, Sunflower’s nine works depict the mutually inspired and cooperative agendas of San Francisco sex workers and the feminist liberation movement. In “Arousal” (1970) a thick crowd surrounds a woman with long dark hair reading a limp flyer. The print of the paper in her hand is out of focus, but she carries a handwritten sign upright and overhead in crisp, all caps clarity: “WOMEN: ARISE NOW, AROUSE LATER” with the Roman sign for Venus underneath. The figure’s concentration is notable. She is decidedly unaroused, turned inward, and may as well be anywhere but at a protest. Only one person in the shot looks directly at the camera: a clean-cut middle-aged man in a button up shirt, tie, and dark-rimmed spectacles.
This photograph helped to pave the way for dynamics present in subsequent images in which women use nudity theatrically to advocate for more agency in public. In “Free the Nipple,” (1970) a woman with a short bob hairstyle in a macrame hat wears a dress that runs down the middle of her chest. Her breasts — nipples covered with pasties — lay bare on either side of the fabric. Behind her stands a thick crowd of suited men. In “Classy” (1970), Sunflower documents a haberdashery, which allegedly remained open for all of one month, during which topless shop girls attended to male customers. In “El Cid Ladies” (1971), dancers from the aforementioned North Beach club are photographed prior to their arrest on the San Francisco Airport’s White Courtesy Telephone, drumming up customers prior to their arrest. While Sunflower’s camera accentuates the divisive and celebratory flirtation with which her female subjects challenge a background of male suits, she captures a concurrent secondary narrative in which those same suits become heteronormative beneficiaries, maintaining their unbroken gaze (and reputable incomes) upon the spectacle of women’s sexual liberation.
The show continues with three works by the Oakland-based photographer, filmmaker, and founder of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, Lenn Keller (1951-2020). The first is a close-cropped, semi-profile portrait of a black child with dreadlocks falling in orderly rows that nevertheless obscure her gaze. It is as though the figure can see us, but not the other way around. Like a photograph taken of or for a family member, the image reads more intimately than any of the other works in the show and stands out as such, recalling Keller’s own role as an activist (and mother) determined to validate women living outside of conventional nuclear families.
Above the framed portrait is a “Dykes for Peace” banner taken from Keller’s archive, which documents ephemeral traces of black lesbian activists in Oakland. Keller’s works are regrettably thin here. One feels compelled to fill in the gaps with her remarkable biography: that she helped found a crisis center for woman, La Casa de las Madres, for instance, and a rape crisis help line. Her five-minute film, “Ifé” (1993), screens on a loop, with the camera in the passenger side of a classic car as a black French woman cruises San Francisco. She smokes and pontificates on how she came to San Francisco because she’d heard it was more liberated than her hometown of Paris. She refuses the trap of love as a weakness, eager to experience as many women as possible. This deceptively simple film subverts the gaze so predominant in Sunflower’s work, though Keller’s own position as expressed in this selection of who exactly is liberated remains ambivalent at best.
Continuing in chronological order, the final set of works of “The AIDS Hotel, San Francisco (1992-1997) by documentary photographer and photojournalist Darcy Padilla (b. 1965) features the inhabitants of the Ambassador Hotel, a six-story, 134-room single occupancy hotel in the San Francisco Tenderloin district. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the hotel, managed by an LGBT Activist, became “an informal hospice” center for those who needed care and had nowhere else to go. Like Paul Fusco, Padilla documented its residents and shadowed social workers on their rounds. Twenty-seven photos titled, “Of Suffering and Time,” hang framed on the wall so as to mimic the windows of a building. An accompanying binder includes numbers and notes affiliated with each photo.
Flipping through, “26” jumps out at you: an emaciated face, close-cropped and smoking, with the Times Roman note: “After the health care worker changed Steven’s clothes and bathed him, she lit his cigarette. In his last months, Steven desired ice cream and vodka because of the open sores in his mouth. I would bring him a pint of Haagen-Dazs and a pint of Royal Gate Vodka in the plastic bottle — Steven’s favorites.” The portrait of another young man, seated upright, looking off to the side as he smokes is designated as “08”: “Chris shares a room with his partner Drummond; both are HIV-positive. They are drug-users and dumpster divers. Every week, the hotel staff has to clear out their room.” Or, “09”: “Dorian, a transgender woman who has AIDS and multiple sclerosis, is flirting in the hallway and says, ‘I’m still just happy and blind as ever.’” Another photo of a man on crutches receiving someone at his door, perhaps a social worker, situates the camera behind the visitor’s shoulder, like a gate crasher.
Others among Padilla’s photos capture men close to death, hands covering their faces in different arrangements of anguish. It’s impossible not to question the camera’s voyeuristic intrusion — an experience further complicated by Padilla’s diary. To consider what consent means under terminal conditions is complicated, particularly when documenting a population whose boundaries have already been irrevocably eroded and dismissed by society at large. What does it mean, in other words, for these now-posthumous subjects to be presented on the wall? What does it mean for Padilla’s unofficial notes to be presented, rather casually, in the plastic sleeves of a binder?
We might bear in mind something the late Barbara DeGenevieve (1947-2014) pointed out with her “Panhandler Project” (2004-06) that representation is also important. Padilla’s work raises such concerns, though they regrettably serve as a subtext to the more gripping foreground tragedy of suffering. On this last count, perhaps, the work fails its subjects, making us — like those well-suited men in Sunflower’s photographs — no more than a spectator.
Caroline Picard is a writer, publisher and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. Fiction and comics appear under the name Coco Picard. Her first graphic novel, The Chronicles of Fortune, was published by Radiator Comics in 2017. She is the Executive Director of the Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005. Curating exhibitions since 2005, Picard has worked with artists like Takahiro Iwasaki, Ellen Rothenberg, Edra Soto, Xaviera Simmons, and others, presenting exhibitions at La Box ENSA Bourges, Gallery 400, The Hyde Park Art Center, Vox Popuili and more.
More at her website, cocopicard.com.
Komentáře