There are a lot of museums in San Francisco but in a recent “readers poll” for the free magazine San Francisco Bay Guardian it was the deYoung museum that was voted top.
It is situated in the middle of Golden Gate Park, the great swathe of green that was created in the western part of the city and now runs from the top of Haight Street all the way to the ocean. The park itself is well worth a visit, it’s a “something for everyone” sort of place; slightly moth eaten Buffalos roaming not-very free, slightly grungy hippy hill, placid boating lake, nicely smelly rose garden, statuesque and sometimes swimming turtles, enthusiastic and free Lindy hop classes on Sunday and best of all the sumptuous spectacle of the roller skating dancers; and from the top of the deYoung tower you get a panoramic view of most of this and the city aside it.
When I visited there was an exhibition of work from the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Hiroshi seems to mix photography and some fairly personal and interesting philosophy. Or perhaps it’s musings, and maybe its fairly eccentric musings.
There was a series of seascapes that were inspired by the question: Is it possible to view a landscape today and see it as primitive man saw it?
Hiroshi says yes with the sea, no with everything else.
The photos apparently all of ancient seas - but to at least one casual observer, the same one - had a pleasing calming aura, but his photos of cinema screens were both brighter and for me more interesting.
Here he tried to answer the question what would happen if he exposed the film to the entire light of a film as it was projected?
A bright white but blank screen is the answer but the resulting photos are powerful images, just a shame that they were all taken in empty auditoriums.
The best thing I think though was one photo easily overlooked in his series on American architecture where he pushed the depth of field to extreme limits to blur and obscure the irrelevant and leave a ghost like image of the essential.
It was not the cross of light that remained in a grainy church that caught my imagination as much as the blurry Twin Towers standing starkly alone in a landscape hidden to the camera. If he went there today all that would remain is that which you can’t see in the photo, a strangely enigmatic thought.
Now you may point out that deYoung is not really a Y, so since every first Tuesday of the month is free museum day I went to see another photographer.
Joachim Schmid, is a German and his exhibition ‘Photoworks 1982-2007’ is in town until October. He comes over as both genius and completely crazy, probably the ideal combination for an artist.
He founded the Institute for the Reprocessing of Used Photographs having claimed that no new photos should be taken until the old ones had been used up. He was submerged by donations but first among them were a collection of studio portraits from a professional photographer.
They had all been systematically cut in half to avoid reproduction but Joachim was inspired to match halves together to create some startling images and then re-photograph them.
At other times he collects discarded photos in the streets, reconstitutes torn ones and catalogues them. The collection is now too large to exhibit so at each gallery he makes a random selection. There were about 100 on show here.
This almost makes him the photographer who doesn’t take photos, which is another enigmatic thought and a good place to finish.
The museum by the way was the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, downtown at Third and Mission so that’s..Y
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