Photography

Altporn 101 with Cutter Smith

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Juliette Tang continues her journey into the altporn world.

Recently, I chatted with Annaliese of the famous altporn site God’s Girls about nudity, tattoos, and DIY photography. In this installment of altporn interviews, I got the chance to talk to Cutter Smith of Altporn.net, the blog to read if you’re a fan of altporn. We literally talked about everything — Cutter is a veritable encyclopedia of altporn knowledge, and his site reflects his thoughtful, intelligent, and knowledgeable obsession with observation of his favorite genre of porn.

SFBG: First, what is the story behind Altporn.net?
Altporn.net: AltPorn.net was launched five years ago with a mission to be the centralized source for fans of the altporn scene. The scene had been around for a while, but was starting to gain more mainstream attention, and we wanted to keep a focus on what we feel are the good attributes of the genre. Here is a quote from our original first post and explains our origins well: “Probably the coolest aspect of this is the DIY-vibe of many of these sites. They aren’t necessarily run by guys like the Colonel from Boogie Nights — many of them are run by men and women who want to express something less degrading and cynical than what the mainstream adult industry is producing. So my interest here is to highlight some of the cool stuff coming out of this movement.” And we’ve been doing it ever since.

Local Artist of the Week

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169-localartist.jpg

LOCAL ARTIST David Young

TITLE Untitled

BIO A San Francisco resident for just over five years, David Young draws inspiration from postapocalyptic films, punk music, street art, graphic novels, and war photography to present a damaged and hostile vision of SF and its place in America. All of the work in his "Live Forever" series is executed with Micron8 pens on Strathmore Bristol and American Masters paper.

SHOW "David Young: Live Forever," Thurs/15 through Feb. 14 (reception Thurs/15, 6–9 p.m.). Babylon Falling, 1017 Bush, SF. (415) 345-1017, www.babylonfalling.com

WEB www.myspace.com/dyoungv

Speed Reading

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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Reel time travel

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Horrible! Overlooked! Best!

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DENNIS HARVEY’S 16 HORRIBLE EXPERIENCES AT THE MOVIES:

1. Over Her Dead Body (Jeff Lowell, USA) Paul Rudd can redeem anything. Or so I thought.

2. Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry, USA) When the cause of whimsy and movie-love requires making every character onscreen a grating comedy ‘tard, you gotta wonder: what made this Gondry joint better than Rob Schneider?

3. American Teen (Nanette Burstein, USA) Manipulated à la reality TV trash, Burstein’s "documentary" pushed the envelope in terms of stage-managing alleged truth. That envelope would’ve best stayed sealed.

4. The Hottie and the Nottie (Tom Putnam, USA) A Pygmalion comedy so atrocious that Paris Hilton wasn’t the worst thing about it.

5. Six Sex Scenes and a Murder (Julie Rubio, USA) Local enterprise to be applauded. Lame sub-Skinemax results, not so much.

6. Hell Ride (Larry Bishop, USA) The Tarantino-produced missing third panel of Grindhouse (2007), this retro biker flick unfortunately forgot to be satirical. Or fun.

7. Filth and Wisdom (Madonna, UK) Madge’s directorial debut — so loutish and inept Guy Ritchie could use it as custody-battle evidence.

8. Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, USA) The worst movie by the sole great director on this list. It was Friday the 13th (1980) meets The Blair Witch Project (1999) — which is just so tired, not to mention beneath him.

9. The Fall (Tarsem Singh, India/UK/USA, 2006) Or, Around the World in 80 Pretentious Ways. A luxury coffee-table photography tome morphed into pointless faux-narrative cinema.

10. Chapter 27 (JP Schaefer, USA/Canada) John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, was a disconnected, unattractive, incoherent mutterer. Jared Leto gained 67 pounds to faithfully reproduce this profoundly boring slob. In the movie, Lindsay Lohan befriends him. No wonder she’s a lesbian now.

11. The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, USA/India) Not the worst Shyamalan. But then again, everything he’s done since 1999’s The Sixth Sense has rated among its year’s worst, no?

12. Surfer, Dude (SR Bindler, USA) This laugh-free comedy proved it’s possible to render 90 minutes of Matthew McConaughey in board shorts into a hard-off.

13. Synecdoche, NY (Charlie Kaufman, USA) What’s like a prostate exam minus the health benefits? The extent to which writer-director Kaufman rams head up ass in this neurotic, pseudo-intellectual wankfest. Its stellar cast walked the plank into elaborate meaninglessness.

14. Australia (Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA) Possibly the most expensive insufferable movie ever made. Can a continent sue for defamation?

15. Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, USA/Germany) Not even surprisingly decent talk-show Elvis impressions can save you this time, Tom Cruise.

16. The Spirit (Frank Miller, USA) The Dork Knight. Least super hero ever. Frank Miller: stand in the corner!

DENNIS HARVEY’S BEST PERFORMANCES MOST LIKELY TO BE OVERLOOKED:

Elio Germano in My Brother Is an Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, Italy/France, 2007)

Shane Jacobson in Kenny (Clayton Jacobson, Australia, 2006)

Emma Thompson in Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jarrold, UK)

Mathieu Amalric in A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

Jane Lynch in Role Models (David Wain, USA/Germany)

Stephen Rea, Mena Suvari, and Russell Hornsby in Stuck (Stuart Gordon, Canada/USA/UK/Germany)

Naomi Watts and Tim Roth in Funny Games (Michael Haneke, USA/France/UK/Austria/Germany/Italy)

Haaz Sleiman in The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy, USA)

Asia Argento in Boarding Gate (Olivier Assayas, France/Luxembourg) and The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2007)

Norma Khouri in Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowski, Australia, 2007)

Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller, USA)

Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA/UK/France)

Thandie Newton in W. (Oliver Stone, USA/Hong Kong/Germany/UK/Australia)

James Franco in Pineapple Express (David Gordon Green, USA) and Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (Bharat Nalluri, UK/USA)

Thomas Haden Church in Smart People (Noam Murro, USA)

Emily Mortimer in Transsiberian (Brad Anderson, UK/Germany/Spain/Lithuania)

Judith Light in Save Me (Robert Cary, USA, 2007)

Kathy Bates in Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, USA/UK)

Anna Biller in Viva (Anna Biller, USA)

Taraji P. Henson in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, USA)

Anna Faris in The House Bunny (Fred Wolf, USA)

DENNIS HARVEY’S TOP 25 (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER):

1. Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, UK, 2007)

2. Bigger Stronger Faster (Chris Bell, US)

3. Brideshead Revisited (Julian Jerrold, UK)

4. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, France)

5. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, USA)

6. Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, USA)

7. Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, USA, 2007)

8. Forbidden Lie$ (Anna Broinowski, Australia, 2007)

9. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (Alex Gibney,

USA)

10. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, UK)

11. I Served the King of England (Jirí Menzel, Czech Republic/Slovakia, 2006)

12. Kenny (Clayton Jacobsen, Australia, 2006)

13. Milk (Gus Van Sant, USA)

14. Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback (Lucia Palacios and Dietmar Post,

Spain/Germany/USA, 2006)

15. My Brother Is an Only Child (Daniele Luchetti, Italy/France, 2007)

16. Planet B-Boy (Benson Lee, US, 2007)

17. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, France/USA, 2007)

18. Reprise (Joachim Trier, Norway, 2006)

19. Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, USA/UK)

20. A Secret (Claude Miller, France, 2007)

21. The Signal (David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry, USA, 2007)

22. Trouble the Water (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, USA)

23. The Violin (Francisco Vargas, Mexico, 2005)

24. Viva (Anna Biller, USA)

25. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/France/USA)

Story of the eye

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

In "Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible," SFMOMA associate curator of photography Corey Keller assembles an exciting encyclopedia of daguerreotypes, photographs, and X-rays to reconstruct and demonstrate the 19th century education of the eye. Separated into species of work (microscopy, telescopy, electricity and magnetism, motion studies, X-rays, and spiritualism) and sub-sectioned into various flora and fauna, "Brought to Light" has the distinct feel of a fin de siecle terrarium or medical amphitheatre — a suitable mise-en-scene for the subject matter.

By way of prologue, "Brought to Light" details the emergence of the improved optical technologies and positivist sciences — largely indebted to French theorist Auguste Comte — that set the stage for a "Copernican revolution" by the latter half of the 1800s. The resulting impact was first felt in the discipline of astronomy, when detailed images of the moon appeared to an astonished public courtesy of George Phillips Bond and Samuel Humphrey.

Though these lunar photographs proved unprecedented in capturing the collective imagination, the scientific community was quick to shift its classificatory gaze to the molecular universe. Early photomicrographers Alfred Donné and Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch experimented with new chemical exposures to produce startling images of diatoms, insects, and human cells. Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey ossified high-speed events through stop-action "chronotypes," thereby converting temporal mysteries — such as the arc of a cannonball, or the positioning of a racehorse’s legs in mid-stride — into a visual experience. By century’s end, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had successfully transmogrified the living human body into a ghostly apparition through his discovery of the X-ray.

So influential was technical culture upon the epistemological discourse of the period that the roving gaze of the scientist had insinuated itself into the collective perception of the laymen. As the astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen prophetically pronounced in 1877, the photography plate had supplanted human vision to become the "true retina." Always intriguing, "Brought to Light" tells the story of a moment in history when the rational world suddenly plunged into its subterranean counterpart, redefining the story of the eye. *


BROUGHT TO LIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE, 1840-1900

Through Jan 4, 2009; $7-$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Hot flash gallery

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> johnny@sfbg.com

It was the summer of 1974, when shy, skinny, cute Daniel Nicoletta first stepped through the doors of Castro Camera into adulthood and history. His parents were snapshot enthusiasts. In his words, he had grown up "surrounded by Instamatic moments." But he was about to enter the time of his life. "I stopped in to determine where I would be developing my Super 8 film," he remembers. "I couldn’t get over how friendly the two guys [Harvey Milk and Scott Smith] were. I was 19 years old — I had no idea what cruising was at that point. Of course, within two months I was completely up to speed."

Nicoletta immediately captured the speed of life. His vérité photos of Milk, Smith, and San Francisco from the mid-1970s onward are often great and sometimes iconic. He soon sold his first photo out of Boys in the Sand (1971)and Bijou (1972), filmmaker Wakefield Poole’s hair salon-toy store-art gallery Hot Flash. A regular "Mr. Multimedia," Nicoletta was as interested in half-inch Portapak video as he was in still photography. In 1977, using Castro Camera as one of his chief meeting spots, he worked with David Waggoner and Marc Huestis to found the Gay Film Festival of Super 8 Films, an event now popularly known as the Frameline festival.

Nicoletta’s role in Milk’s life and role in queer film history provide some of the subtler facets of Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk. Those viewers familiar with Van Sant’s earlier work know of his focus on the photographic process: for example, a significant sequence within his 2003 film Elephant is spent in the darkroom, observing the efforts of a young photographer who may as well be a 21st century version of the young Nicoletta. "Even though I don’t say a lot, Lucas [Grabeel, who plays Nicoletta in the film] is a constant presence throughout Milk," Nicoletta notes, when asked about the interplay between his life and Van Sant’s moviemaking. "Gus keeps me there in the film as a cultural observer. In life, Gus has an eye for the role of still photography in culture, and he used my entity as a way of cross-referencing that."

Some of Nicoletta’s photos of Milk and Smith inform or inspire the look of particular scenes in Milk, such as a pie fight between Smith and Milk. "The art department was immersed in stills of all kinds," says Nicoletta, who switched to digital photography to document the making of the film. "I was impressed with all the things pinned up to their walls — the checkerboard analysis was lovely to look at." Nicoletta also lent his copy of the August 1974 San Francisco issue of the barely-subtextual gay culture magazine After Dark — a publication partly defined by the studio portraiture of East Coast gay photographers such as Ken Duncan and Jack Mitchell — to Milk‘s costume designer, Danny Glicker. "He [Glicker] creamed himself over that," Nicoletta says with an affectionate laugh. "There’s a postage stamp-sized photo of Victor Garber [who plays George Moscone in Milk] in it. I’d never noticed, but it took Danny Glicker a second to zero in on that. It was hilarious."

The Milk crew’s devotion to verisimilitude extended to Nicoletta’s camera — and to one of Milk’s two main cameras, one of the first Nikons ever made, which Nicoletta now owns. "They literally had me take jpgs of my camera and Harvey’s camera so they could cast those instruments to the letter," he says. "Harvey’s camera has his name engraved on the bottom. Scott’s [Smith] mom gave it to me when Scott passed away. It’s a real treasure. I never use it, but I saw him use it. Harvey and Scott also had a second Nikon that was their primary camera, and I did use that one quite a bit. We both passed film through the same camera, which was kind of cool — kind of incestuous."

This radical sense of brotherhood informed both Nicoletta and Milk’s photography. "Harvey took great joy in photographing people," Nicoletta observes, noting that a chance to take aerial photos of Christo’s Running Fence was one of Milk’s artistic and free-spirited moments as his political duties increased. "If you look at Harvey’s body of work, one thing that comes through with political potency is that a presiding aesthetic in his life was male-to-male love. You can then zoom out even further and say that the stimulus for his political activism was the sanctification and preservation of male-to-male love."

It’s characteristically modest of Nicoletta to turn an interview about his photography into a discussion of Milk’s endeavors with a camera — everything he says about Milk’s photos is true of his own work, which captures Milk and Smith’s relationship, for instance, with great warmth. He gives vivid background to some of his best-known Milk photos, such as an image of the inaugural walk to City Hall in January 1978. "We were just arriving at the steps," he remembers. "What’s great about that photo is that it’s just one of so many details of the history of the queer community that have unfolded on those very steps. I think I could do a whole book on the steps of City Hall at this point."

The prospect of a Nicoletta monograph is something to savor, even if he jokes that his friends "all roll their eyes to the back of their head and say, ‘There she goes again about her book’," whenever he mentions the prospect. As a documentarian of history, Nicoletta understands the necessity and gravity of a book of his work. He has other excellent ideas, such as an era-based collection that would bring in stylized images by Steven Arnold — like him, one of the chief people to visually capture queer artistic forces such as the Cockettes and Angels of Light. "I loved working with Reggie [of the Cockettes] because the first photo I ever saw of him was in Gilles Larrain’s [1973] Idols," Nicoletta says. "That book just rocked my world. I thought, ‘Who are these people, and where can I find them?’ And I found them."

Nicoletta found those people — the evidence is in books such as Gay by the Bay and Adrian Brooks’ new Flights of Angels (Arsenal Pulp Press, 224 pages, $24.95), and in the photo collection of the San Francisco Public Library. As a chronicler of gay life, he can be seen as a West Coast public counterpart to East Coast photographers such as Peter Hujar, Mark Morrisroe, and David Armstrong, and Nan Goldin. "In a sense I’ve sort of stayed provincial. That’s a little bit self-preservationist," he says, after mentioning the direct influence of the Bay Area studio photographer Crawford Barton on his work. "It’s so great to have a 30-year arc and be mindful of where you are and grateful for things like the mentorship of people like Harvey Milk and Scott Smith, and the inspiration of people like the Angels of Light. I’m for slow growth."

>>Back to the Milk Issue

The Milk Issue

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It took Hollywood 30 years to make a feature film about the life of Harvey Milk, and when Gus Van Sant finally got the gig, and Sean Penn agreed to play the title role, it came out too late to have an impact on the California election. Would Milk, the movie, have helped defeat Prop. 8? Nobody knows. But the movie is inspirational, and with any luck will carry the message of Milk’s life to the masses. Milk always said that the more straight Americans got to know gay and lesbian people, the more they would be open to equal rights.

The Guardian covered Milk’s career as it was happening, devoted a special issue to him when he was assassinated, covered the trial of Dan White and the infamous Twinkie Defense and the riots afterward. And with the movie hitting theaters this month, we’re taking a look not just as the movie but the political legacy of Harvey Milk.

>>Political theater
Gus Van Sant gives Harvey Milk his close-up
By Kimberly Chun

>>Politics behind the picture
Would Harvey Milk be happy with San Francisco today?
By Steven T. Jones and Tim Redmond

>>I remember Harvey
Guardian memories of the long-haired young hopeful
By Bruce B. Brugmann

>>The apathy and the ecstacy
St. Harvey inflames, but does he inspire?
By Marke B.

>>Hot flash gallery
Now and then in the photography of Daniel Nicoletta
By Johnny Ray Huston

>>Behind the “Twinkie Defense”
The reporter who coined the infamous phrase looks back at the White trial
By Paul Krassner


>>Past, present, future
The time is now for The Times of Harvey Milk
By Johnny Ray Huston

BONUS
>>Where’s Harry?
Harvey Milk’s political torchbearer gets written out of film history
By Tim Redmond

From the archives (PDF)
How the District Attorney Joe Freitas’s office blew the Dan White murder case, May 23, 1979
By Robert Levering and David Johnston

Danny Boyle on Bollywood, game shows, and Indian fairy tales

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SFBG’s Louis Peitzman interviews Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle on the eve of the release of his latest flick, Slumdog Millionaire

slumdog1.jpg
L-R: Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Photo by Ishika Mohan

San Francisco Bay Guardian: Slumdog Millionaire is a very colorful and vibrant film. Obviously much of that has to do with the art direction and cinematography, but what was your role, as a director, in creating that look?

Danny Boyle: It was all linked to the central approach of this, which is, we didn’t try — because you can’t, is the real reason — to control it or recreate bits of it or change it. You’ve got two approaches as far as I can see. You either stand back and look at it sort of pictorially, which I didn’t really want to do. We did some tests like that and that is an approach, and you can see that, especially in photography about India. It is extraordinary to look at sometimes. But I didn’t really want to do that. I just wanted to dive in there and I thought that by the time the story’s over, you’ll have got that pictorial sense of it. You’ll have accumulated it rather than actually be introduced to it bit by bit. So that was the idea, that we would film on the streets, use live sync sound as much as we could, and actually not change things, not redesign things, and if they did change, which they did — they’d change in front of your eyes, literally — we’d go with that change. So there wouldn’t be any obsession with continuity, like there is normally on films. And we just accepted the fact — if you see it again, you’ll notice there are lots of people looking at the camera, and there’s guys saying, “No filming here” to the camera, things like that, which are all left in. And you just go with that as an approach, and you benefit from it. It drives you mad in one sense, in the controlled, precise think, but in the other way, you get life. You get a sense of it, or I hope you do. You get a bit of the flavor of what Mumbai is like as this electric city. So that was the idea; that was the approach.

SFBG: Going back to what you said about people looking into the camera and other moments like that, it feels like the movie goes back and forth between fantasy and realism. It’s almost a fairy tale but with elements of real life. Was that something you were going for?

DB: It’s just India, that. Their movies are fantastical, kind of like ridiculous things, and the life on the street is brutal in one sense, and yet the two sit together. That’s the whole point. It’s why they sit together really. So you’re infected by that. It’s so melodramatic, the story, in one sense. It’s two brothers, of course — a good brother and a bad brother, and that is absolutely key to Indian cinema. That idea of good brother and bad brother. And they usually lose sight of their mother — their mother is kidnapped or lost — and then they find their mother again at the end when they’re reconciled. But the bad boy has to die. And then there’s always this thing about eternal love, which is also key to cinema there, which is this everlasting love that’s pure and will overcome all obstacles. So those are the kind of things that you kind of get infected by. It’s a bit like coming to America and you make a crime film, because crime and the way the country’s been built, crime has been so linked to the way the country’s been built, so inevitably, there is a reason why there’s so much crime in American movies, why it’s so key to American movies, because it’s a part of the culture.

dannyboyle.jpg
Director Danny Boyle. Photo by Ishika Mohan

So you end up, as a foreigner coming here, your film would be partly about crime inevitably. There are certain things that you just accumulate from the place, and you can’t resist or avoid. And Simon [Beaufoy] got that in the writing; he got that partly from the book, but also from his own experiences, ’cause he toured India 20 years ago and he’d always wanted to write about it and never been able to find a key way in. He’d always wanted to write about it, and like me, he’d never wanted to do a Westerner in India. And I would never do a film like that. I don’t want to watch Western guys wandering around India or anything like that. I sort of made a film like that, The Beach (2000), and I found it a very unsatisfying way of dipping into a country and just taking from a country for your own purposes. I much prefer to go there and try to submerge myself and the story in the place, and then come out of it. There are problems because studios say, “Well, there’s no white guys in it, there are no recognizable names,” but that’s the way things are gonna go. Fortunately, I think that more of the world is opening up. We’re gonna hopefully share more in a way. I think that’s the way it’s going.

Bill Berkson

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Bill Berkson’s poetry is a tortoise-and-hare countryside — no one’s watching the clock, although it’s lunchtime in early fall. When you read his poems, you say, "They’re doing it for me, I’ll do it for them." His life in art (first as a self-described "kid on the scene of the first New York School," later as a sleeper cell in the New York–Bolinas "axis of poetry evil") could be signified by a freshly minted tarot card: Collaboration. See the new magic of this year’s Bill (Gallery 16 Press, 45 pages, $25), with Colter Jacobsen’s great two-way mirror drawings and Berkson’s fugitive lines spun in juvenile detective silk. Bring your own tightwire.

A teenage crystal hanging by a thread — or as he puts it, a "human blood medallion" — spins through Berkson’s folio. An alphabet of poets and artists from Ashbery to Guston to Waldman to Warsh shows up in his prism, ricocheting light — "a puzzling brightness" open at all points where points leap into the second dimension. "Bands of distracted emotion snap" their fingers to a Hart Crane tune: "I have no system / but there is a motor," Berkson writes in the 1973 Angel Hair collection Recent Visitors, "primitive / American / sophisticate." And yet: "I insist on the poem having its own life, its own existence," he explains over the phone during a recent visit to Los Angeles, where his son Moses Berkson’s photography is on view at Constant Gallery.

What about Berkson’s art writing? His reviews read more like travelogues, with an equivalent claim to autonomy. In 2003’s The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings (Qua Books), he gives form to "the parallel text" through a string of dispatches from inside paintings. The poet’s eye becomes a 360-degree liquid camera unfreezing Franz Kline’s bridge spans: the paint is wet to us. Elsewhere, in reviews and in last year’s Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 2001-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 114 pages, $10), there’s a sweet-tooth accuracy of description — Wayne Thiebaud’s SF Victorians are "each a different pastel tone like those of Necco wafers" — paired with fluent shoptalk. It’s so much fun to be here.

"Functionally, art writing serves as commercial expository prose," Berkson explains. It’s often a portrait of the artist painting portraits of the market, and that’s why Berkson left it behind, mostly, for 15 years. (Artforum buttonholed him for monthly reviews in 1984. "Arrogant as ever," he explains, though at first it’s easy to mistake arrogant for elegant, "I thought I could make a little difference." Later: "I love to describe things — something that stays still…") Yes, for Berkson, "the sentences in a review turn up in a kind of order," but here comes the doozy: "Cracks in the order may show an alertness to, and duplicitous tolerance for, the actual chaos occurring in the mental space between the reviewer and the work."

What’s throwing all that heat called "actual chaos"? The birth of trust? Berkson’s pages are like starlit nights above the suburbs — to their own devices left, eyeing attic windows in Transylvania, they’re at home among "a host of secret, ephemeral, and often unspeakable perceptions." Best of all is their mysterious shimmer, which appears when an older writer gets replaced by a younger experience. A snapshot of Berkson’s out-of-body landscape as seen from the air: rivers of molten brass with tributaries of friendship bridged by action. Wonderful stuff. A great deal of valuable work. Fifty years of slow-dawning epiphany.

GOLDIES 2008

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Welcome to the other side. There’s got to be a morning after, and here it is. It brings 14 reasons why the Bay Area doesn’t just create its own political discourse — through art, it charts wonderlands and hells beyond any campaign promise.

The Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery awards turn 20 this year. The Goldie Awards have manifested as marathon-length award ceremonies, wild parties, and even as formal affairs. They’re usually rough around the edges, and always as great as the people they honor. Four years ago, in the immediate wake of George W. Bush’s reelection, Lifetime Achievement winner Bruce Conner exorcised a desolate awards night by dancing. This year’s awards, in part a celebration of all the winners of the last two decades, are dedicated to his memory.

This year’s Goldie winners were selected by the Guardian‘s Kimberly Chun, Cheryl Eddy, and Johnny Ray Huston, with valuable input from our writers and critics, including Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Glen Helfand, as well as members of the Bay Area arts community. The people in this issue turn apartments into stages and art galleries, transform entire theaters into stage sets, and bring the changing face of San Francisco to the screen. They make guitars sing, and in turn they sing like well-tuned strings. They write the history of modern art and poetry. They know the force of a cosmic ray. Join them, and us, on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 111 Minna — 11/11 at 111 — for a celebration. It’s free. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Click below for more on our winners. All winner portraits by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover Photography

The winners of the 20th annual Goldie Awards

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT



>>LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI AND CITY LIGHTS BOOKS
Anything but a vanity press
By Ari Messer


>>V. VALE AND RE/SEARCH PUBLICATIONS
The monkish punk elder of counterculture in the Bay
By Kimberly Chun

———-

DANCE



>>ERIN MEI-LING STUART
Focusing on the mess humans manage to create for themselves
By Rita Felciano
———-

FILM



>>BARRY JENKINS
Viewing the city — and its displacements — through the prism of a relationship
By D. Scot Miller


>>KINO21
Creating a lively forum for critical engagement with aesthetics
By Matt Sussmanr

———-

LITERATURE



>>BILL BERKSON
Fifty years of slow-dawning epiphany
By Julien Poirier

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MUSIC



>>CITAY
Sublimely interwoven acoustic and electric guitars and lushly appointed folk-rock
By Kimberly Chun


>>THE DODOS
Concocting a sound that verges on epic, minus muddle
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>JONAS REINHARDT
Wembley-sized dreams for the contemporary Krautrockers
By Michael Harkin


>>TRACKADEMICS
Different buzzes in different circles, consciously
By Garrett Caples

———-

THEATER



>>THE CUTTING BALL THEATER
It’s often the warped glass that furnishes the truest picture
By Robert Avila

———-

VISUAL ART



>>MATT FURIE
Endangered species to champagne-and-SpaghettiOs
By Johnny Ray Huston


>>KAMAU PATTON
Behold the warp of truth, infinite
By Marke B.


>>MARGARET TEDESCO
An approach that always includes inviting others into the fold
By Glen Helfand

A different kind of pin-up

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By G. Martinez Cabrera

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The new pin-up.

Recently, camera shutters were clicking and clothes were coming off in Potrero Hill. Fifteen photographers from all over the West Coast gathered at Blue Sky Rental Studios for an all-day bootcamp hosted by Zivity.

Zivity specializes in publishing pin-up and glamour photography while stressing the importance of the model’s role in each picture. Models and photographers find each other on the site and decide on the tone and the content of each set as a team. To ensure an equal partnership, Zivity splits royalties equally between photographer and model for every shoot. Usually “photographers get all the credit,” one participant said, but Zivity seems to want to change that.

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The collaborative process.

Speed Reading

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WOLFGANG VOIGT — GAS

By Wolfgang Voigt

Raster-Noton

128 pages with CD

$46.49

One of many noms de guerre of Kompakt Records founder Wolfgang Voigt, Gas represented the vanguard of a techno-ambient hybrid that flourished throughout the 1990s. The cryptic methodologies of Stockhausen, the operatic pretensions of Wagner, and the libidinal energies of Deleuze were bandied about in this subculture of citation and pastiche. The result was an interdisciplinary flourishing of art beyond the strict borders of musical formatting into mixed media.

Voigt’s newest release — a book of photographs taken throughout the forests surrounding his native Cologne — is finally gaining international renown for the record boss, composer, and aesthete. The book is a cousin to the landmark Nah und Fern box set released earlier this year by Kompakt. As with Nah und Fern, Voigt’s photography centers on the forest and the sky — potent artistic and political signifiers of nature in the German psyche.

"Gas is Hansel and Gretel on acid … a seemingly endless march through the under woods — and into the discotheque — of an imaginary, nebulous forest," Voigt has said. In reality, Voigt’s images are much less jejune or ambulatory than such a quote might imply. The dense forest tableaux combine the beauty of Lee Friedlander’s desert brambles with the sinister fluorescent emulsions of Warhol’s "Death and Disaster" series. The ingress of techné that — through serial repetition and fractals — dominates these images in turn triggers a surreal aura: the natural and mechanical blend effortlessly in Voigt’s lens. To say these representations of the magic forests of Germany are disturbing is an understatement. But they are also meditative and inspiring. (Erik Morse)

THE BOOK OF LISTS: HORROR

By Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley

Harper Paperbacks

432 pages

$14.95

Calling The Book of Lists: Horror a reference book seems a bit unfair, if only because that designation makes it sound like something you don’t read front-to-back — something that probably doesn’t have a section titled "Eli Roth’s Ten Nastiest Horror Movie Genital Mutilations." Roth’s ouchfest is only one of the many such lists the book offers in its five sections. Film and literature receive special attention, but other horrific areas don’t go ignored. The result is a playful, comprehensive, and immensely readable work. Seasoned horror gurus will appreciate veteran list guru David Wallechinsky’s annotated look at a half-dozen overlooked horror films, while anyone who’s not too sensitive can enjoy "James Gunn’s Nineteen Favorite Reason God Made Humans So Squishy."

Authors and editors Amy Wallace, Del Howison, and Scott Bradley have attracted an impressive array of talent to make contributions: Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and a posthumous Johnny Ramone all make appearances, and most have something interesting to say. With so many lists, not all can be as entertaining as "Davey Johnson’s Account of the Involuntary Reactions of Ten Dates to Ten Horror Movie Moments." But since the format allows for plenty of skipping around, misguided entries can be easily avoided. If there’s one real complaint to be levied against The Book of Lists: Horror, it’s that the visual content is underwhelming. Images should certainly accompany lists like "Steve Niles’s Top Twenty Horror Comic Covers." Sure, you’d have to lose some text, but it’s like they always say — one picture of disembowelment is worth a thousand words. (Louis Peitzman)

The mirage

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>johnny@sfbg.com

America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.

— Dave Hickey, "A Home in the Neon"

If, as Oscar Wilde once claimed, a lie can tell the truth, then what Dave Hickey writes is truer than ever: looking at Las Vegas is a terrific way to see the United States. Paul Verhoeven knew as much when he made Showgirls (1995). The fact that his old-school Euro-Hollywood auteur vision of Sin City offended so many bourgie film critics only proved its lasting, um, value. Like Verhoeven, the Italian artist Olivo Barbieri also appreciates Las Vegas from a distance. But while Verhoeven maintains his distance even in the middle of a lap dance, with site specific_Las Vegas 05 (2005), Barbieri prefers literal remoteness. He appraises the bright colors and the neon glow of Las Vegas from up above, via a helicopter.

The resulting view of the Entertainment Capital of the World, another chapter in Barbieri’s ongoing project of urban portraiture, is one half of Henry Urbach’s well-timed exhibition "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas." Within Urbach’s black-box presentation, Barbieri’s long-distance perspective trades off with the Tetris walls, distorted mirrors, and repetitious gambling-addict flurries of Stephen Dean’s warmer yet less resonant No More Bets (2004). At first glance, the amazing thing about Barbieri’s videos is how unreal and utterly toy-like the cityscapes appear, and Las Vegas is no exception — thanks to his tilt-shift lens 35mm photography, a rooftop antique-car rally looks like a kids’ collection of model cars, and the Luxor’s Sphinx and white-nippled Pyramid are mere parts of an elaborate toytown.

Today, as the US dollar seems more abstract and illusive than ever, Las Vegas’ playland presentation of all that money can buy has attained a new level of honesty. (It also seems endearingly quaint in comparison to 21st century "evil paradises" — to quote Mike Davis — such as Dubai.) "The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication," Hickey writes in "At Home in the Neon," from Air Guitar (Art Issues Press, 216 pages, 1997). When Vegas resident Hickey notes that "there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert," he may as well be writing a description of Barbieri’s video, though site specific_Las Vegas 05‘s helicopter hovers like a dizzy bird above an old McDonald’s and the Stardust’s ’50s-luxe marquee (where Wayne Newton is missing an e). Barbieri’s debt to a site-specific avant-garde film tradition (such as pat O’Neill’s 2002 The Decay of Fiction) becomes clear when he reaches the fountains of the Bellagio. There, he wryly connects waterworks out of Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice (1953) with soundtrack detonations that evoke Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976). Bathing in the sensory overload of "Double Down: Las Vegas," one suspects that — like the arcade in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s apocalyptic Pulse (2001) — Las Vegas would go on glowing and chiming long after all the people are gone.

Dave Hickey begins Liberace: A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz (BükAmerica, 16 pages, $1.49), a tribute to the ivory-tinkling owner of the world’s largest rhinestone, by describing his own balcony view of the Strip, where the neon logos of the Desert Inn, the Stardust, Circus Circus and other sites make the surrounding nature look "bogus as hell." As Hickey puts it, more wittily than Jean Baudrillard, "the honest fakery of the neon" trumps "the fake honesty of the sunset." Perhaps we should replace the face on the one-dollar bill. George Washington has done his time. Bring on Liberace.

DOUBLE DOWN: TWO VISIONS OF VEGAS

Through Jan. 4, 2009; $7–$12.50

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

“SF Open Studios: Weekend 3”

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STUDY 3, 2003 BY DAVID KING

PREVIEW The third weekend of Open Studios focuses on spaces in Bernal Heights, Duboce Triangle, Glen Park, Eureka Valley, Noe Valley, and the Castro and Mission districts. Here’s a lucky-seven list of artists worth seeking out.

Matt Sarconi Spatial clarity is a major aspect of Sarconi’s photography; his use of frames within frames elevates images that might be pretty as a greeting card into something more contemplative. His settings span from the Bay Area to Spain and Croatia.

A.J. Oishi There’s at least a bit of the late Sol Lewitt in Oishi’s low-key commercial acrylic-on-canvas paintings. She patterns circles within circles (or conversely uses smaller circles to form larger ones) while experimenting with muted versions of appetizing colors such as chocolate, orange, and cherry.

David King The gallery owner Jack Fischer first showed me some of King’s collages, which commingle camp and metaphysical imagery in a manner that never neglects visual pleasure. King’s most recent work veers away from blue-hued dreamland into darker, microscopic images. His sharp-eyed use of found material means an upcoming residency at the San Francisco Dump holds promise.

Lauren Kohne A mixed-media piece that mines musicality from the grids, strips, and numbers on Muni bus transfers demonstrates Kohne’s interest in foregrounding societal habit and patterns.

Victor Cartagena Artist and teacher Cartagena had a stark solo exhibition at Galeria de la Raza earlier this year — a visit to his busy studio is bound to reveal different facets of (and relationships between) his mixed media works, painting, and printmaking.

Bill Basquin This is a busy time for Basquin: you can find his collected films for sale at Needles and Pens, see at least one of them projected by kino21 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this week, and check out photos from his urban garden series "SOILED" at Mission Pie. He’ll show photos and installation work at Open Studios.

Robert H. Garrett Garrett’s photo in the Open Studios guide suggests a color version of Henry Wessel’s droll, laconic, crisp images of the suburban landscape.

SF OPEN STUDIOS: WEEKEND 3 Various neighborhoods, SF. (415) 861-9838. www.artspan.org

Paper weight

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Call me wasteful, call me Luddite, call me nostalgic, call me obsolete. I’m not ashamed to admit it: I like paper. I like it a little too much. These days, when I look at paper, I have a pair of scissors in my mind if not my right hand — I want to take the complete form of detritus that a single sheet or a full book represents, and cut it into a new shape. Maybe it’s a visual extension of editing words for a living. Maybe it’s a basic reaction to the stacks of visual and text-based matter that I shuttle from one space to another in the city when I’m not staring into the Valhalla of the computer screen or — heaven forbid — reminding myself that I have a body.

This week, I’ve been carrying a couple of heavyweights from work to home and back again: Glamour of the Gods (Steidl, 272 pages, $65) and The Stamp of Fantasy: The Visual Inventiveness of Photographic Postcards (Steidl, 216 pages, $60). Both books are testaments to the specific charms of paper, with tactile qualities — a gloss and an undivided directness, for starters — that no expensive flat-screen monitor can match. They’re made to be ravished, not ravaged. They also tell — via numerous knockout illustrations — a story. That story is of paper’s important role in relation to art and photography (or photo-documentary) in the 19th and 20th centuries.

A few weekends ago I went to a paper expo in San Francisco, where I admit to being nonplussed by the dozens of vendors with box upon box of postcards that cost $25 or more apiece. The sheer surplus of matter, coupled with the collectors’ prices, was off-putting. The Stamp of Fantasy, however, instantly reminded me of the artistic value of the postcard, a form I first fell for in high school, when I’d thumb through decks of cards for a well-executed trick image of a person with a cat’s or baby’s head. Curated by Clément Chéroux from the collections of Peter Weiss and Gérard Levy, the book presents those types of pictures, along with other puns and surrealist touches: melting Eiffel Towers; Victorian women with roots for torsos; human faces blooming from trees, emerging from mountain- and moonscapes or blooming from the tail-ends of trails of pipe smoke. Less predictable visions — a mass of Chinese baby faces akin to one of Weegee’s Coney Island photos; children riding butterflies in a realm not far from Henry Darger’s imagination — have a wow or jolt factor. They also effectively preview Hannah Höch’s innovative postcard-based collage.

Hollywood movie-star stills — the oft-luminous portraits that icons like Joan Crawford would autograph and send to thousands of fans — are the subject of Glamour of the Gods. It draws from the peerless collection of the late biographer and gadfly John Kobal, who helped bring renown to artists such as Crawford’s favorite cameraman, George Hurrell, via the 1980 book The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers. When I look at Greta Garbo’s reliably stunning close-up collaborations with the undersung and influential Ruth Harriet Louise, I think of Garbo’s remarkable skill at blocking paparazzi shots from any angle with her hands (demonstrated in Gary Lee Boas’ sweet 1999 book Starstruck) and ponder the old camp quip about the lie that tells the truth. Something has been lost in the journey from glossy paper to the infinite sea of candid digital imagery. Ramon Novarro and Clara Bow weren’t all about going to Starbucks for Frappuccinos. As someone once said, they had faces.

Vizzy with the possibilities

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KATIE KURTZ PICKS


•"The Wizard of Oz" Not much has changed since L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz debuted over a century ago and gave Americans something we still crave: escape to a fantastical land free of wicked witches. These days it’s not the Emerald City that Dorothys everywhere are tripping toward but a place called "hope." The works in this group show curated by Jens Hoffmann, including more than 20 artists (Clare Rojas, Raymond Pettibon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, et al.), were made either in response to the classic tale or relate to the story’s many layered meanings.

Sept. 2–Dec. 13. Reception Sept. 2. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.wattis.org

•"Vocabularies of Metaphor: More Stories" In this group show of works on paper highlighting deconstructed narratives, all but two of the 16 artists included are women — one of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls drawings makes an appearance. "Vocabularies" is a chance to see how women are considering the figure — female, male, and animal — in a postnatural world, though this idea is not the exhibit’s emphasis. Of note are Rachelle Sumpter’s gauzy gouaches, Canadian Yuka Yamaguchi’s dismembered turtles, and Pakistani Shahzia Sikander’s nature-inspired pattern-making.

Sept. 6–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 6. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

•California Academy of Sciences The mothership of scientific and sustainable nerdiness finally opens! This Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified facility includes a planetarium, swamp, rainforest, and a living roof. If you prefer your nature virtual, you can always hang out with the PenguinCam.

Big Bang opening gala Sept. 25; free to the public all day Sept. 27. 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org

•"Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900" Scientific photography of yesteryear is a healthy reminder of just how long we’ve been trying to discover everything that can possibly be discovered and recording it for posterity. More than 200 photographs, American and European, scientific and pseudoscientific.

Oct. 11–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres" Co-curated by Berin Golonu and independent curator Veronica Wiman of Sweden, this activist exhibition is intended to further the green dialogue through collaborations between artists and organizations, conversations with the public, and urban interventions.

Oct. 31–Jan. 11, 2009. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

KIMBERLY CHUN PICKS


•"Barbara Holmes and Casey Logan" What a dump! The two artists’ four-month residency climaxes with 3-D work inspired by and composed of salvaged material. Sculptor Holmes worked with wooden lattice to create a series of kaleidoscopic forms in assorted states of weatheredness, while Logan morphed musical gear and other detritus into pieces that meld with his fascination with science and fiction.

Sept. 26–27. SF Recycling Art Studio, 503 Tunnel, SF. www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

•"Nikki McClure" The graphic rep of Olympia, Wash.’s riot grrrl scene is undoubtedly best known for her bold, iconic paper cuts revolving around nature, motherhood, activism, and community. Music cover-art, illustrations, and books have all found a place in a vision grounded in simple gestures, uncontrived pleasures, and everyday labors.

October–November. Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St. SF. (415) 255-1534, www.needles-pens.com

•"Outpost" Exploding the imaginary and futuristic dimensions of architecture, "Outpost" collects the apocalyptic planes and jagged rubble of Bay Area sculptor David Hamill and the dazzling grids and Spirograph-esque constructs of New York City artist Jeff Konigsberg.

Sept. 5–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 5. Johansson Projects 2300 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 999-9140, johanssonprojects.net

•"Hilary Pecis" Folktronica, meet your maker: the SF artist creates her downright psychedelic panoramas by layering drawings with fragments sliced from glossy magazines. Pecis was also recently named as a recipient of the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts and will be showcased at SF Arts Commission Gallery.

Sept. 6-26. Reception Sept. 6. Receiver Gallery, 1415 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-RCVR, receivergallery.com. Also "Immediate Future: the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts," Sept. 6-Oct. 18. SFAC Gallery, 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org

•"Yves Saint Laurent" Viva le smoking! The beloved groundbreaker may be dead, but Yves Saint Laurent has never been hotter, judging from this autumn’s many attempts at rich-hippie/gypsy folklorico, highly sexed men’s wear for women, and silky Parisian-lady drag. This major retrospective’s single US turn showcases more than 120 accessorized ensembles in addition to drawings, photos, and videos.

Nov. 1–March 1, 2009. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung

JOHNNY RAY HUSTON PICKS


• "I Feel I Am Free But I Know I Am Not" See “Connect four,” this issue

Sept. 4–Nov. 1. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, 2nd floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

• "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas" Olivo Barbieri looks at Vegas as toy town.

Sept. 18–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"Bayete Ross-Smith: Pomp & Circumstance" and "Jonathan Burstein: Visage" Ross-Smith’s prom portraits are fresh, and Burstein’s paintings of museum guards trampoline off the humor present in his handsome past portraits of himself.

Sept. 4–Oct.11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetwogallery.com

• "Lutz Bacher: ODO"

Oct. 31–Dec.31. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

• Open Studios A step outside the galleries, museums, and art fairs — for better, for worse, and for real.

Oct. 11–Nov. 2. Various locations, SF. (415) 861-9838, www.artpsan.org

• "Dustin Fosnot: Simmons Beautyrest" Fosnot’s comic inventiveness should be a relief.

Oct. 14–Nov. 15. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

• "LA Paint" A survey of 11 painters, sure to fan a variety of Bay-and-LA flames.

Oct. 4–March 8, 2009. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl. (510) 238-2200, www.museumca.org

• "These are the People in Your Neighborhood" Mr. Rogers is quoted for this 15th birthday celebration including work by Libby Black and Xylor Jane, among others.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Gallery 16, 501 Third, SF, www.gallery16.com

•"Artists Ball Seven: The New Party" Stanlee Gatti and Mos Def, together at last.

Oct. 3. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, www.ybca.org

•"Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered" A prelude to "Warhol Live," which hits the de Young next year.

Oct. 12–Jan. 25, 2009. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. (415) 655-7800, www.thecjm.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Photo Issue Q&A: Sean McFarland

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To choose just one photo by Sean McFarland for this year’s Guardian Photo Issue was tough. Ultimately, we went with one from 2005 that looked best within the issue’s layout. McFarland’s more recent work was markedly different, but just as impressive. The interview below is interspersed with some of these more recent photos, and some interesting background information about their mysteries.

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Sea, by Sean McFarland

At the moment, McFarland is part of the survey of Bay Area photography on display at City Hall (through Sept. 19), but that isn’t his only current show with a strong local element. He’s also a contributor to “Let Us Now Praise San Francisco,” at the 77 Geary space Marx and Zavattero Gallery. Up through this Saturday, it brings together select writers and photographers for a SF-specific 21st-century answer to James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ famous combo of word and images, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

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Tornado, by Sean McFarland

SFBG In the last year or two, your work has shifted away from urban views to elemental images: sky, sea, vast land. What has set you off in that direction?
Sean McFarland: I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which the earth changes. In an urban environment, we build buildings, roads, and parks, changing the landscape. These are immediate and obvious alterations of our environment. Our actions also change the landscape as we alter the climate – more frequent and powerful storms, rising seas. By focusing on making images of the natural world, of the landscape, I’m interested in making pictures of us. How we change the earth and how the earth effects us.

Photo Issue: Molly Decoudreaux looks beneath the nightlife

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Photo by Molly Decoudreaux

It’s hopeless to ignore the incredible explosion of nightlife photography that’s happened on the Web and in art schools these past few years. And what better time than now, with our Photography Issue on the stands, to examine it a little?

For those of us who clung desperately in our ’80s Midwestern teens to every month’s Details (back when it was a nightlife zine and Michael Musto didn’t pee on celebrity legs) or took i-D as our lifeline to street fashion and personality-inversion in the outer world, the big bang’s been both exciting and a bit disconcerting. On the one hand, there’s incredible creativity being documented instantaneously and available to all — even in Djibouti, fantastic weirdos need never feel alone. On the other, there’s the sense that mere dressing up for the ever-present cameras has replaced actual self-expression. Misshapes! Cobra Snakes! Blue States Lose! And then there’s just the pure horrificality of sites like this one, which are about boobs. Par-T&A!

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The upside: Club kids from the ’80s

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The downside: Hoochies from last week

And yet, and yet. The dancefloor snappers here in SF are giving the nightlife bulbs a spin of their own, by focusing on the more artistic aspects of Clubland’s odd-wonderful players — and taking off in thoughtful directions, not restricting themselves to mere sublebrity paparazzi.

Case in point — the fab Molly Decoudreaux, a well-known nightlife gadabout who’s just published a fine new book, Here and There: Portraits.

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The Oakland native got her start snapping pics of her hot dyke and faggot friends in blackout res, and has worked on projects for the Lexington Club, Big Top, and Lusty Lady.

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Along the way, she’s developed a fierce photographic aesthetic that positions Clubland’s outsized personalities into a meditation of place. Her photos take in these club kids with admiring eyes, yet also deepen their glorious showboating with examinations of their daytime surroundings and situations. “My primary interest is portraiture,” she told me last week by phone. “Also gender representation and presentation — I started college as a gender and queer studies major — but captured in a way that looks at the layers through which we reveal or transform ourselves. Little cracks can show a lot.”

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Photo Issue Q&A: Jessica Rosen

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The cover image of this week’s Photo Issue comes from Jessica Rosen. While it reflects Rosen’s recent shift toward collage — which she also is using to create one-of-a-kind handbags and books — it only represents one facet of her work to date. Rosen’s website presents sections devoted to some of her earlier projects. Her vivid portraiture is defined by a striking use of color and shadow, and by a cooperative, perhaps even collaborative, bond with her subjects. I asked her about all of these things recently via email.

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From Jessica Rosen’s series “The Beach,” at www.jessicarosen.com

SFBG: Brazil is important to your photography to date. How did this come to be?
Jessica Rosen: To some degree, the location of my images is incidental. For about three years I was living between New York City and Rio de Janeiro. New York became my day job and Rio became my studio. Working in Brazil was simply a process that functioned really well for me.
Many of my photographs are rooted in a very specifically Brazilian setting, but I feel like I was exploring the same ideas that I had always been interested in. I was thinking a lot about cultural constructs of gender and sexuality and how those play out in the formation of subjective identity. I was also really interested in sex workers because I feel that this work becomes a very literal performance of sexual and gender stereotypes. And more importantly, the specificities of this performance are a reflection of more general cultural systems.
It’s not that those ideas could be exemplified only using Brazilian subjects. I mean, I could have been working with American sex workers and created different images that would have addressed the same ideas. In fact I have done projects of this nature in New York City. But Brazil was a great place to explore my interests.

Oh snap!

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CELEBRITY PHOTOGRAPHY Before "stalkerazzi" was a word, before the first images of the Brangelina twins fetched a reported $14 million, and before the Internet spawned sites like tmz.com (stuffed with candid pictures of famous-ish trainwrecks like Kim Kardashian and Shauna Sand), there was a way of life that involved not knowing intimate details of every celebrity who dared to leave his or her house. Movie stars had a certain air of mystery and inaccessibility. But in 2008, there’s no privacy anymore. We now know that stars are "just like us." As in, Reese Witherspoon eats fro-yo with a spoon — just like me! Amy Winehouse falls down when she’s drunk — just like me! Uh, anyway. Hollywood studios used to stage advantageous photo ops of, like, Rock Hudson out on a date with his wife. These days celebrities have no choice but to put their entire lives on film, particularly if they’re given to the kind of Britney Spears-ish behavior that can make the operator of a well-placed camera exceedingly well-paid.

All this makes Gary Lee Boas’ Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan (Dilettante Press) all the more charming and understated. Boas has been touted as an outsider artist — and, at least when the book was released in 1999, he was working as a professional paparazzo — but first and foremost, the man is a fan. Starstruck collects Boas’ treasured snapshots (the oldest taken by a teenage Boas in 1966, the collection runs to 1980) of luminaries he encountered on the street, outside movie and stage premieres, at restaurants, waving from the backseats of cars, entering talk-show studios, on film locations, and in other spots he staked out in search of famous quarry. The photos are of variable quality — some are blurred, some have their subjects partially obscured by passersby. Some are clearly taken on the fly — outside the Mike Douglas Show in 1978, Ida Lupino (flanked by a pair of nuns) squints into the sunshine and seems to be just noticing the eager, camera-wielding man to her right. A Godfather-young Diane Keaton beams at Boas (who must’ve been a pretty engaging snapper, considering most of his photos feature smiles) as she stands, hands clasped, on a New York City sidewalk.

Some of the pictures demand extended captions, as when Boas shares the story behind a much sought-after 1978 photo of the elusive Greta Garbo. But most are accompanied by brief notations of who, where, and when. Boas himself appears in a handful of photos, posing stiffly beside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. His expression in each is, appropriately, Starstruck — reflecting a time when mystery and glitter and not just-like-us-ness suited stars just fine.

Shoot from the hip

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Def Leppard and Nickelback: you know I want my fantasy, and everyone is aware of how those cool, desirable, shocking, or subversive photographs are integral to fanning the flames of so many rock ‘n’ roll clowns’ dreamscapes. But it’s those moments when a picture delivers more than words that have inspired some to pick up a camera and keep shooting. Local noise-punk photog Lars Knudson can verify this, concerning one Arab on Radar show at Bottom of the Hill back at the turn of the millennium. "I saw this band Pink and Brown, and this audience of people who were absolute freaks, ultra-nerd ‘tards, hipsters, scenesters, or whatever you want to call it, and I felt so alive and so at home," Knudson recalls today from his work as a chef in San Carlos. "I tried to describe it to everyone I worked with, and they looked at me like, ‘Huh?’ Then I stumbled on these images that were taken by Virgil Porter [Burn My Eye] and showed them to people, and they said, ‘ooh!’"

As SF photographer Peter Ellenby [Every Day Is Saturday (Chronicle)] testifies, Jim Marshall put the Bay on the map for music photography and shooters like Jay Blakesberg have kept it there. But what about the newbs — armed with the latest digi point-and-shoot and inspired, à la Knudson, to begin capturing a fragment of the sound and the fury? Around the same instant everyone began to believe they could be a DJ, so too did all and sundry start to assume that they could also be an ace lens swinger.


John Vanderslice: Photo by Peter Ellenby

So how does one carve out a name as a music photog when the glut of images on Flickr and assorted photoblogs threatens to overwhelm? I gathered snippets of sage advice from a few area rock photogs: Knudson, Ellenby, and Debra Zeller, who honed her craft focusing on local indie combos via her Playing in Fog online project and concert series, has since expanded into professional wedding photography (originally shooting the nuptials of the Red Thread’s Jason Lakis), and currently books live music at the Make-Out Room.

•Be a music lover, foremost. "That’s why I did photography part-time for so long — it’s really hard to make a living in music photography," says Zeller (www.playinginfog.com, www.dazrocks.com), who has shot Cat Power, among others, at the behest of their labels. "What magazines pay is absolutely ridiculous and getting the work is another challenge." Additionally, Knudson says, "Part of the reason I have good photos is I know when they’re going to rock out. If you’re not prepared to get lost in the moment, you should go home and be an artist, because it isn’t about you and what you got that night, it’s really about what the band did onstage that night." In the spirit of shareware and the scene he has documented, Knudson makes thousands of his images freely available to bands — and really anyone — on a not-for-profit basis at www.pbase.com/pistolswing.

•Show everyone your work. "I showed my photos to as many people as possible," says Ellenby (www.ellenby.com), who photo-edited zines like Snackcake and Devil in the Woods. "All the bands and my friends knew I was for hire, and you have to not be afraid to be take criticism and set goals. When I was starting out my favorite band was Overwhelming Colorfast, and my goal was to shoot them, and Bob Reed would rip on them all the time."


Elliott Smith: Photo by Debra Zeller

•Know the craft, natch. "I think it’s important to shoot in manual and really know how to work your camera," Zeller insists. "That’s how you get the images. If you just rely on program mode, chances are you’ll be lucky to get a couple of good shots."

•"Don’t be afraid to work for a six-pack," advises Ellenby, who cofounded tech company GeoVector and is currently working on a Joe Strummer photo project. "Don’t think it’s your road to riches, either — especially if you like indie music. I would make more money if I wanted to, but I don’t like working for a giant music corporation. I like it better when I’m working one-on-one for a band — when you’re hired by a band you can let the creativity flow."

•"My only other piece of advice is, shut up and push the button," Knudson says. "When you’re shooting live bands, you’re going to miss the shot if you’re busy telling your friend how cool you are."

I CAN GO FOR THAT

SON AMBULANCE


Dulcet Midwestern pop-smiths take on Someone Else’s Déjà Vu (Saddle Creek). Wed/6, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

FUTURE BLONDES AND C.L.A.W.S.


Malevolent Houston beats call up the ground-control SF bass-meister. With Skozey Fetisch. Thurs/7, 9 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

ME FIRST AND THE GIMME GIMMES


Punk supergroupers grope classic hits anew with Have Another Ball! (Fat Wreck Chords). Sat/9–Sun/10, 8 p.m. $15. Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. www.theeparkside.com

PROJEKT REVOLUTION


A revolution in rock-hip-hop pairings begins with Linkin Park, Chris Cornell, Bravery, Ashes Divide, Busta Rhymes, Hawthorne Heights, and Street Drum Corps. Sat/9, 2 p.m., $34–$77. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. www.ticketmaster.com

DARYL HALL AND JOHN OATES


Private eyes, they’re watching you, watching you, watching you-o-o-o-o-o. Tues/12, 7:30 p.m., $49.50–$78. Mountain Winery, 14831 Pierce, Saratoga. www.ticketmaster.com

Optic nerve

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› johnny@sfbg.com

This is the second year that the Guardian has devoted an issue to local photographers. I’ll wait until it happens a third time before deeming the project an annual endeavor. It’s easy to believe in that possibility, because the range of photography in the Bay Area right now is exceptional. This great state of affairs is partly due to spaces and organizations such as SF Camerawork, RayKo Photo Center, and PhotoAlliance. It’s also due to more do-it-yourself street-level groups such as Hamburger Eyes and one of this issue’s 10 contributors, Cutter Photozine.

Last year’s photography issue focused on portraiture, but this year I’ve opted for a survey approach that allows for spontaneous connections. Jessica Rosen and Sean McFarland both utilize collage, but with vastly different results. Keba Konte’s collage aesthetic adds objects to imagery and links history to autobiography. Investigative work leads to political or societal exposure within Trevor Paglen’s and David Maisel’s photography. Adrianne Fernandez and Bayeté Ross-Smith focus on youth as they bring new twists to traditions such as the family album and the prom portrait. Dustin Aksland’s portraiture also includes teenagers, sometimes plopped onto or stopped within American landscapes, while Mimi Plumb likens rural landscapes to the backs of horses.

August may be when summer winds down and a portion of SF prepares to camp elsewhere, but it’s an important time for local photography. This issue coincides with PhotoAlliance’s and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery’s annual exhibition of local photographers. Two of the 10 artists on the following pages are part of that show. American photography also will be playing a major role at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art next year, when that space presents an exhibition devoted to Robert Frank and his classic monograph The Americans (Steidl).

In honor of an old adage or clichéd truth, there aren’t a lot of words next to the pictures that follow. But the text does include Web site information. In most cases, these photographers’ sites function as another gallery of sorts, one that lacks the tactile nature and dimensions of an actual photograph but at least suggests the variety of a body of work to date. Scope them out, and scope out Pixel Vision, the Guardian‘s arts and culture blog, for interviews and other photography-related pieces this week. Last, before you look, some thanks are due to Glen Helfand, Chuck Mobley, and Mirissa Neff for their help in the selection process, and to Kat Renz for a last-minute idea.

Also in this issue:

>>Killer shots from the bowels of rock

>>Before stalkerazzi, there was Gary Lee Boas

>>Q&A with Heather Renee Russ of Cutter Photozine

>>Q&A with Jessica Rosen

>>Molly Decoudreaux looks beneath local nightlife
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NAME Adrianne Fernandez

TITLE Daddy Sends His Love

BACKGROUND In my "Alternative Album" project, the interplay of social and personal history is essential. It yields a complex tension between irony and nostalgia for the so-called family album.

SHOUT OUTS My influences include artists such as Larry Sultan and Elinor Carruci, who have worked with their prospective families to create intimate images that provide a compelling look into family dynamics.

SHOWS "Gender Agenda," through Sept. 14. The Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, Mich. www.thegalleryproject.com. Also "Not Your Mama’s World," Fri/8 through Sept. 9. Washington Gallery of Photography, Bethesda, Md. www.wsp-photo.com

WEB AlternativeAlbum@aol.com

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NAME Jessica Rosen

TITLE I Could See the Amazon from the 5th Floor of the Robert Fulton Projects
BACKGROUND This work is a large-scale photo collage installation made from cut-up, layered C-prints of my original photographs. It measures about 10 feet by 12 feet. Because this scale relates to human scale, it allows the viewer to experience the image as an environment rather than as an isolated image.

SHOUT OUTS My work stems from a fascination with people. Over the years my art practice has continually focused on portraiture. Although my newer collage works may seem quite fantastic, most are truly portraits in the traditional sense.

SHOW "Jessica Rosen," through Oct. 1. Open 24/7 (storefront window). Keys That Fit, 2312 Telegraph Ave, Oakl., http://www.xaul.com/KEYS/home.html

WEB www.jessicarosen.com

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NAME Cutter Photozine

TITLE Top to bottom, untitled photos by (1) Ethan Indorf; (2) Keith Aguiar; (3) Ace Morgan; (4) Darcy Sharpe

BACKGROUND Cutter is a San Francisco documentary photo magazine. Founded by Heather Renee Russ and Alison O’Connell, it has a DIY ethic and is eco-positive (it uses recycled paper and soy-based inks). Cole Blevins, Jesse Rose Roberts, Sara Seinberg, and Rachel Styer also worked to put out the first issue, which includes 20 photographers and spotlights Ace Morgan’s uncanny blend of rage, longing, joy, and punk rock.

SHOUT OUTS Cutter is dedicated to people telling their stories and documenting their existence. We seek to undo traditional voyeurism toward the "other" and place the power of sight in the focused home of the author.

SHOW The first issue can be purchased at local shops such as Needles & Pens. They’re currently accepting submissions for the second issue, due this fall. There will be a release party and photo show in late November.

WEB www.cutterphotozine.com

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NAME David Maisel

TITLE 1165 (from Library of Dust)

BACKGROUND The large-scale photographs of the "Library of Dust" series depict individual copper canisters, dating from 1913 to 1971, which contain unclaimed cremated remains of patients from Oregon’s state-run psychiatric hospital.

SHOUT OUTS Robert Smithson, NASA photographs, 19th-century exploratory landscape photographers (especially Timothy O’Sullivan), and the New Topographics photographers from the mid-1970s.

SHOW "David Maisel: Library of Dust," Sept. 4–Oct. 4. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Haines Gallery, 49 Geary (suite 540), SF. (415) 397-8114, www.hainesgallery.com. Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 108 pages, $80) will be released in October.

WEB www.davidmaisel.com

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NAME Keba Konte

TITLE Detail from "888 Pieces of We"

BACKGROUND The eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year is approaching, and in alignment with this auspicious moment I have created this exhibition of 888 photographs printed on wood, copper, and vintage books. I’ve had to select from thousands of images spanning 42 years in order to choose 888 that reflect my journey: there are protests and portraits, street moments and political movements; freaks, friends, and family members. As a documentary and portrait photographer, one observes the beautiful strangers. However, looking at this large body of work, another story comes into focus: my own.

SHOUT OUTS Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Sebastião Salgado, Ruth Bernhard, Kimara Dixon.

SHOW "888 Pieces of We: A Photo Memoir," Fri/8 through Sept. 8. Oakland Art Gallery, 199 Kahn’s Alley, Oakl. (510) 637-0395, www.oaklandartgallery.org

WEB www.kebakonte.com

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NAME Sean McFarland

TITLES Untitled (park)

BACKGROUND I work from an archive of photographs I’ve made, along with images gathered from print and other media. Through collage, new pictures are formed. Recently my work has focused on weather, nighttime, and the ocean.

SHOUT OUTS For now, two books: National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather, (Knopf, 1991), and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (D.A.P., 2007). Also, students, friends, and just about any archive.

SHOWS "18 Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography," through Sept. 17. Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–8 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlet Place, SF. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org. Upcoming: "Johanna St. Clare, Paul Wackers, Sean McFarland, Dan Carlson," October. Thurs.–Sat., 1–5 p.m. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama, SF.

WEB www.sean-mcfarland.com

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NAME Dustin Aksland

TITLE Paso Robles, CA (2005)

BACKGROUND This was shot during a trip to Paso Robles. My friend and I pulled off the highway to take the back roads into town. As soon as we pulled off, we passed this man sleeping in his car. We went about a half-mile and I made my friend turn around. We pulled up in front of the car and I shot two frames out of the passenger window.

INSPIRATION "Useful pictures don’t start from ideas, they start from seeing." — Robert Adams.

SHOWS "States of Mind," September. TH Inside, Brussels, Belgium. "States of Mind," November. TH Inside, Copenhagen, Denmark.

WEB www.dustinaksland.com

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NAME Bayeté Ross-Smith

TITLE Here Come the Girls

BACKGROUND This is part of a series that documents high school students in Berkeley, east Oakland, San Francisco, and Richmond as they mark their ascension from childhood to adulthood through the celebratory rite of passage known as prom. Taking a cue from traditional prom photos, the portraits allow for seriousness and playful flamboyance, depicting a vast array of budding identities.

SHOUT OUTS Walter Iooss, the Magnum photographers, and James Van Der Zee.

SHOW "Pomp and Circumstance: First Time to Be Adults," Sept. 4–Oct. 11. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary (mezzanine), SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetwogallery.com. Upcoming: "Off Color," Sept. 19–Nov. 1. RUSH Arts Gallery, New York.

WEB www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

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NAME Mimi Plumb

TITLE Harley

BACKGROUND These photos are part of an ongoing series that began about 10 years ago when I photographed a herd in the John Muir Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada. The horses in this new series live in Petaluma.

SHOUT OUTS Horses’ backs embody the landscape. They become the horizon and horizon line, at times transforming into the rolling hills of the California landscape where I grew up, before tract houses and strip malls became the norm.

SHOW "18 Months: Taking the Pulse of Bay Area Photography," through Sept. 17. Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–8 p.m. San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlet Place, SF. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org

WEB www.mimiplumb.com

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NAME Trevor Paglen

TITLE KEYHOLE 12-3 (IMPROVED CRYSTAL) Near Scorpio (USA 129), 2007

BACKGROUND This is a photo of reconnaissance satellite, taken from the roof of my house in Berkeley. It’s part of a series of photos of American spy satellites.

SHOUT OUTS I got interested in photography because I was working on projects that were nonfiction allegories, projects that played with notions of truth and what we can and can’t see. To me, photography is the medium that does that best. It captures reality and at the same time doesn’t. I like that tension. I also became interested in photography post-9/11 because photography became an aggressive gesture in a way that it wasn’t before — people could be arrested for photographing the Brooklyn Bridge. The act of taking photographs outside became an exercise in civil rights.

SHOWS "The Other Night Sky," through Sept. 14. Wed.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft, Berk. (510) 642-0808, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. Upcoming: Taipei Biennial, Sept. 13–Jan. 11, 2009; Istanbul Biennial, 2009; "2008 SECA Art Award Winners," Feb.–May, 2009, SFMOMA.

WEB www.paglen.com

Repulsion!

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"I like young women, as do most men, I think," Roman Polanski confesses in the opening sequence of Marina Zenovich’s fascinating new documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Few artists could recite such a controversial preamble as convincingly as this infamous auteur, loved and reviled with equal fervor after a 45-year career. While it focuses on the Hollywood rape scandal that enveloped Polanski in the spring of 1977, and his subsequent flight from the law, Wanted and Desired doesn’t portray the oft-demonized director as a villain or a victim. Instead, it renders him as an inscrutable outsider and poète maudit.

Through an excellent assortment of press footage and interviews, including talks with alleged rape victim Samantha Geimer, Zenovich reviews if not reopens California vs. Roman Raymond Polanski. She does so with a meticulous eye toward correcting inconsistencies and misconceptions. Polanski was no stranger to tragedy and controversy. As a young boy, he survived the Holocaust on the streets of Krakow after most of his family was shipped to Auschwitz. After a successful career in London and Hollywood in the 1960s, he was again devastated when his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by Charles Manson’s "family." By the ’70s, Polanski had a licentious reputation, abetted by his dark, often Faustian films.

Enter 13-year-old Geimer, a California innocent pushed by her ambitious mother into a nude photography shoot with Polanski. The events of the night that followed would haunt the director and his young victim for decades.

Some critics will probably deride Wanted and Desired as pure hagiography, or worse yet, a legitimization of Polanski’s crimes and subsequent fugitive status. But Zenovich’s intentions circumnavigate any idol worship, as her refusal to err toward his guilt or exoneration makes clear. Rather, Wanted and Desired‘s stinging invective of Hollywood justice places much of the blame on a starstruck media and judiciary. As if fulfilling Polanski’s dystopic vision, the film leaves us repeating some prophetic words from Chinatown (1974): "I see you like publicity … well, you’re going to get it." Polanski, ever the outsider, remains at large.

ROMAN POLANSKI: WANTED AND DESIRED

Opens Fri/25

Roxie Film Center

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