Think, Look, Make

Self-propelled internal combustion. Vehicles of Expression. Still to be found in San Francisco. near 3rd street 24th street 24th and Mission near 3rd street near Cortland, on Bernal Bayshore and Cortland, Baby. Near Harrison street Florida Street at 24th Harrison Street  near 3rd street Embarcadero

In 2013, the Basque director Oskar Alegria introduced his film " The Search for Emak Bakia" at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival. An exceptional experimental film, it weaves documentary, storytelling, and history while revealing aspects of Man Ray's time in the Basque Country that are difficult to appreciate otherwise. Emak Bakia means "leave me in peace" in Basque and it was also the name of the house that Man Ray lived in. In this movie there are scenes of women sleeping whose eyes are captured just at the moment of awakening. These reminded me of some of my favorite Man Ray photos, such as the one of Kiki de Montparnasse.  http://emakbakiafilms.com/fotos/?pid=1 Kiki and the African Mask, by Man Ray 1926

The “Beauté Congo” exhibit at the Fondation Cartier in Paris was so successful that it was extended until 2016.   Famous men such as Congolese politicians, Barak Obama and Muhammed Ali were the subjects of many works. I rarely saw the image of a woman- even then, they were provocatively dressed or a showcasing a car or pregnant with a male writer/artist.   Most wall labels indicated the artists were men. This is not unusual, in any part of the world.   According to the Guerrilla Girls, in 2012 less than 4% of artists in the modern art section of the Metropolitan Museum of New York were women. Ken Johnson wrote about this same issue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  51 Contemporary Artists, but Just Three Women In 2016, in a major art capital like Paris, at an exhibit representing an entire country and spanning a century, I had hoped for more.  I asked someone working at the museum if there were any women artists in the exhibit. One assistant said: “Ther...

Kizomba at the Viaduc Paris, 2015 Every encounter with a person or a place has the potential to change us. The person who changed my way of seeing, as a photographer, was Robert Clarke-Davis. I was lucky to have spent moments wandering with him in Chicago and San Francisco, watching him take photos. And, he sent me camera equipment and photographs of his to look at, nearly every week, for years. My eyes perceive the world differently because of him.  Joel Meyerowitz quit his job and decided to become a photographer on the day he met Robert Frank, even though they barely exchanged words. I enjoyed watching this video, in which Joel describes watching Robert take photographs of two children and the effect that hearing Frank press the shutter had on him.  Little snippets: “The small gestures seemed to have meaning, or potential for meaning. I felt the rhythmic flow. They were visual revelations. When I left the location, suddenly, everything on the street seemed dynam...