An Autobiography of The San Francisco Bay Area (Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself)

Catherine Opie. Jerome Caja, 1993; Chromogenic print; 19 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

SF Camerawork’s 35th anniversary show “San Francisco Plays Itself” is like stepping onto a Diane Arbus/Nan Goldin-esque set.

Most of the works are framed photographs with accompanying statements, but the conversations contained within and between—the characters, the eccentrics, the occasions, the friends, the moments, and the sense of time—animate the gallery spaces. This is the story of San Francisco from 1974 to the present.

Ken Miller photographs Bill Vollmann in drag. Gail and Dale play gently on a beach of Katy Grannan’s making. Dennis, SF Camerawork’s favorite UPS guy, proudly displays his UPS tattoos in Jona Frank’s uniform series. Larry Sultan’s grandiose portrait of Denise Hale for W magazine looks slyly over at Catherine Opie’s pose of Jerome Caja as a Spanish matriarch on the other wall. The Jangs play out their ‘70’s lives in dens and sitting rooms in Michael Jang’s neat scenarios. A young Richard Misrach hangs out on a five-block stretch of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from 1972 to ‘74, the staring faces looking very much like present-day hipsters.

Ari Marcopoulos’s two huge, distressed photocopies on paper stand out as remnants, depicting a scar on an arm and bruises on torsos that look like bullet holes. They literally and metaphorically seem to be pointing the way, punctuation marks in an unfinished chapter.

Curated by Chuck Mobley, “An Autobiography of The San Francisco Bay Area. Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself” is on view at SF Camerawork until October 21, 2009. “Part 2: The Future Lasts Forever” opens in January 2010.