Title: Sightlines: Photographs from the SFMOMA Collection
Dates: Through May 7, 2023
Location: Third Floor, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Overview: This lively exhibition spans the history of photography and explores subjects ranging from studio portraiture to cameraless photography.
Introduction
Where we stand directly shapes what we see—and the imaginary lines we draw among the objects before us. Only by changing our position, or our sightline, can we change our perspective. The term “sightline” originated with the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who used it to describe the field of view afforded by a particular vantage point in a painting. Theater designers later adopted it to refer to an audience member’s view of the stage. In the context of this exhibition, it becomes a rich metaphor for the relational nature of looking.
Sightlines offers a new way of presenting SFMOMA’s photography collection. It features more than two hundred photographs—over half shown here for the first time—and replaces chronology as its guiding principle with a multiplicity of stories and perspectives. Some galleries focus on individual artists or bodies of work, while others trace the evolution of particular photographic techniques or themes. Together, they tell stories of empathy, influence, and innovation. The exhibition begins with a gallery devoted entirely to early studio portraiture, exploring how photography can create a sense of belonging, and concludes with a selection of cameraless works spanning different historical periods. In between are galleries examining the relationship between body and landscape, Louis Carlos Bernal’s color photographs of barrios in the American Southwest during the 1970s, and much more. Taken together, these galleries form an ever-evolving snapshot of where we stand.
Contemporary Studio Portraiture
In contrast to the artists in the neighboring gallery, those shown here revisit and reinvent the conventions of traditional studio portraiture. Whether playfully invoking its familiar formulas or using the genre to explore identity, they treat the studio as a space for collaboration, experimentation, and imagination.
© InternetCarrie Mae Weems is an internationally acclaimed photographer and social commentator known for her incisive explorations of identity politics, race, and gender. This work pokes fun at the kitschy aesthetics of bridal portraiture.
© InternetThomas Ruff, a leading figure in German postmodern photography, magnifies the neutral, taxonomic style of passport photographs to a monumental scale, challenging the idea that a portrait can reveal its subject’s inner life or emotions.
© InternetThe photographs “taken” by David Robbins were not actually shot by him. Instead, these eighteen headshots were made by a professional portrait photographer as an ironic commentary on the celebrity status enjoyed by artists of his generation.
Recent Acquisitions
SFMOMA’s Department of Photography remains closely attuned to the wide range of photographic practices today and regularly adds new work to its collection. Every work in this gallery was acquired within the past three years. Though varied in focus, they share a fundamental concern: their makers use the camera to explore the threshold between the visible and the invisible. Probing the limits of representation, they consider subjects ranging from individual and collective trauma to the nature of memory and the sense of belonging within a community.
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© InternetZora J Murff and Rana Young view their shared experience of absent parents as if through a prism, delving into their family histories through a series of deeply personal subjects.
© Richard Huang
© InternetGauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad combine the languages of photography and painting to convey the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
© InternetAnthony Hernandez photographs Los Angeles through the perforated metal screens of bus shelters, revealing how urban space can foster community while also producing alienation.
Together, these works testify to the boundless ingenuity with which artists use photography to distill complex ideas into visual form.
Louis Carlos Bernal
The barrios of the American Southwest were the great muse of Louis Carlos Bernal (born 1941 in Douglas, Arizona; died 1993 in Tucson). His compassionate color photographs made there underscore his connection with their residents. The works on view belong to Espejo, or Mirror, a project launched in 1976 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). Bernal was one of five photographers commissioned to document Mexican American life. The resulting work was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California in 1978, and MALDEF donated the photographs to SFMOMA in 1982.
© InternetBernal was among the first photographers to define his work explicitly as Chicano: “I wanted to communicate what I had found—a new pride, a new self-awareness beginning to emerge both within me and within the community. The Chicano attitude—a new attitude—allows us to embrace our history while also giving us new ways to confront the realities of the present and the future. My images reflect the religious and family ties I have experienced as a Chicano. I have focused on the mysticism of the Southwest and on the strength of the barrio’s spiritual and cultural values. These images were made for the people I photographed.”
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© InternetDeath of a Valley
© InternetDorothea Lange described the series Death of a Valley as an attempt to show human beings as active agents of both life and death. In 1956, she and Pirkle Jones began documenting the final year of the town of Monticello in Napa County before it was flooded to create Lake Berryessa. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation called for a dam and reservoir to supply water and irrigation to the region’s expanding cities. The photographs show life before and during the town’s destruction. Ranches, homes, and orchards were demolished; even the cemetery was dug up.
© InternetLange and Jones focused on the human cost of redistributing water. They paid tribute to the community’s history and the values that held it together, documenting a way of life about to be erased from the landscape. They also collected quotations from residents who had no voice or agency in determining their fate. Death of a Valley tells the story of people forcibly uprooted from the land they called home—a recurring pattern in American history. The series was first exhibited at SFMOMA in 1960, and the questions it raises about the price of progress remain relevant today.
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© InternetShifting Terrain
This gallery explores how photographers past and present have brought investigations of the body and the landscape together. The assembled artists treat the natural landscape as a means rather than an end in itself, breaking down our habitual tendency to see the land as something separate from us.
© InternetFor modernist photographers such as Anne W. Brigman and Edward Weston, nature became a setting for creative connection with family, friends, and partners. Later, ideas about landscape prompted artists to examine the body conceptually. Jeanne Dunning, for example, uses the camera to make the human form appear strange and unfamiliar.
© InternetAna Mendieta’s Silueta series documents her earth-body sculptures, in which she imprinted herself into the ground to create a dialogue between body and landscape.
© InternetMore recent photographers explore questions of access and belonging in relation to place; in their work, the landscape becomes a site of resistance and reclamation. Los Angeles–born artist Chanell Stone photographs herself in urban gardens at public housing developments, emphasizing that connections between people and the natural world are not confined to national parks but can flourish just as readily in overlooked fragments of green space.
© InternetTseng Kwong Chi, California, Hollywood Hills, from the series East Meets West
© InternetSelections from Paul Hassell’s Shepherds series
Cameraless Photography
Cameraless photography distills the photographic process to its most fundamental act: recording the presence or absence of light on a photosensitive surface. By setting the camera aside, the artists shown here challenge definitions of photography that depend on the depiction of perspectival space. Their work offers a different form of storytelling, foregrounding inventive experimentation and bold abstraction. Extending from the neighboring gallery, this selection of works from across photographic history considers how abandoning the camera has given artists new ways to see and make pictures.
Here, cameraless photography can serve both as a field for avant-garde experimentation and as a space for investigating the material nature of photographic paper.
© InternetMan Ray called his works “rayographs.” To make them, he playfully arranged objects on photosensitive paper and exposed it to light, recording a surreal reality that hovers between abstraction and representation.
© InternetAlison Rossiter makes her works with expired—and therefore unstable—photographic paper. When chemically processed, these photosensitive surfaces yield a wide range of results, sometimes resembling a romantic nocturnal landscape and at other times a hazy Rorschach test. An advocate for the material qualities of photography, she releases the latent potential of each sheet through her darkroom experiments.
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© InternetWolfgang Tillmans is one of Germany’s foremost contemporary photographers. Freischwimmer 116, shown here, belongs to his series of the same name. The German word Freischwimmer literally means “free swimmer” and is also the name of a swimming certificate awarded to children. Throughout the series, the term lends the work a poetic resonance; fittingly, it also carries the figurative sense of learning to stand on one’s own. This suggestion of liberation emerges in the surface patterns Tillmans creates with laser light: relinquishing control, he allows the light to leave its marks freely across the paper. A solo exhibition of Tillmans’s work is also on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2023 and is well worth a visit.
Reflections
- The exhibition feels like a series of small exhibitions within a larger one. Each is clearly focused, concise, and tightly edited, making the experience relaxed and allowing me to concentrate on the subject at hand. It broadened my horizons and gave me plenty to think about.
- In portrait photography, I find myself drawn to expressionless, deadpan images—nothing mannered or affected.
- I was delighted to see original works by several masters whose names I had admired for years.
- Cameraless photography can take so many different forms. Seeing them was a revelation.
Note: The writing is based on the exhibition texts, and the translation draws on a version produced with ChatGPT. Most images come from the museum’s official website. A number of works in the exhibition could not be reproduced here because they contain nudity.