San Francisco - Pier 24 Exhibit

[Jim Graves]

Just back from a quick SF trip ... 1st visit to the Pier 24 Photography exhibition -- very nice.

Pier 24 is right on the bay directly under the Bay Bridge. The gallery is in an old waterfront building that has been freshly remodeled. The individual rooms are very roomy and completely empty except for the photographs on the walls. It is a perfect venue for photographs to be displayed.

Tickets are free but require a reservation (available online) ... they are for two-hour blocks limited to 20 viewers at a time so you are never crowded nor hurried. It took the two us just over an hour to do the tour and we were often in a room by ourselves. There are wandering docents to answer questions.

The current exhibit - showing through 12/16/2011 - is eclectic in format and subject matter ... all related to San Francisco ... it includes everything from old large format landscapes to a series of digital shots taken of the computer monitor screen of different street-level scenes on Google maps.

Here's a link: Link (http://www.pier24.org/index.html)

[Mark Woods]

I went to the inaugural exhibit and was totally blown away. There were 3 rooms of Walker Evans. The large main room off the foyer had over 100 of the Beecher's work hung salon style in grids that was amazing. In the foyer was 11 Edward Weston nudes hung in a diamond pattern. There were about 50 Friedlander images, etc. I went with the LACMA PAC group and we spent about 3 hours looking and going back for another look and talking with the director and the assistant director. They were discussing the SF show that is up now. In the back (not public) they showed us the area where they keep photos and set them up before they go on the walls. Pretty amazing and wonderful.

If anyone has the opportunity, I really suggest going there.