It seems unbelievable that ten years have already passed since Pier 24 opened its doors in San Francisco. Perhaps that’s because this great venue for looking at photography remains so exciting, and so welcome, that it still feels like a recent addition to the local gallery scene.
Everything about the place is perfect. It’s free, but you have to reserve your visit in advance, so you are never looking at pictures among crowds. The rooms are purpose-built for photography—perfectly sized, perfectly lit—and the building itself is located on one of the old Embarcadero piers, a piece of San Francisco history converted to delightful modern use. There are no wall captions, so you are practically forced to have a direct encounter with the images themselves. (If you are curious, you can refer to a hand-out that gives the photographer name, title, and date for each piece.) And the annual shows last long enough so you can send all your friends to them, even friends visiting from out of town, before they have time to close.
I have liked some of the shows better than others, but every one of them had things worth looking at. And now the best-of-the-best from those ten years have been pulled together for this stellar anniversary show, Looking Back. Curated with great subtlety and intelligence by Allie Hauesslein, Pier 24’s associate director, it might just be the most exciting collection of photographs I have ever seen gathered in one place.
There are, of course, the classics: Paul Strand’s blind woman, Lewis Hine’s workers on the Empire State Building, Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother (in several different poses). And there are roomsful of Diane Arbus, including not just her best-known photos (like the boy with the toy hand grenade, or the bowed-down mentally disabled woman from the Untitled series) but also a huge range of her other work, including unexpected things such as an overhead view of Times Square. The additional Dorothea Langes, too, are worth attending the show for—not just the deservedly famous images like White Angel Breadline and the other Depression-era photos, but rarer ones like the 1952 Consumer Relationships, which shows a wide urban sidewalk with a haughty-looking mother trailed by a tiny and rather despondent-looking child. My favorite Hiroshi Sugimoto of all time—his wax-work Last Supper, movingly damaged by rain—has a room practically to itself. The Lee Friedlander that graces the catalogue cover, of a woman in profile walking through a revolving door, is certainly one of his very best, too.
The colorful hotel rooms and apartment interiors by Alec Soth, the street scenes by Henry Wessel and Fred Herzog, the Mahdan Mahatta and Edward Burtynsky factory images are all amazing. But I think photographs I like best are the portraits. These range across the board, from the posed close-up to the distant capture, from the purposely strange to the excessively familiar. Weirdly, there are actually two different photos of Truman Capote in the show—one by Irving Penn, the other by Richard Avedon—but there are also much less typical Avedons, portraying the creased faces of working men. Lewis Hine’s touching group portraits of coal-workers convey one kind of intense emotion; a different kind of intensity is rendered in Dorothea Lange’s Funeral Cortege, which shows a woman looking out at us through her black car’s oval window. Famous photographers (Arbus, Friedlander) have been captured on film by other famous photographers (Winogrand, Avedon). And then there are the anonymous portraits, like those in the series of mug shots that fill one whole wall of a large room. Unknown people and unknown photographers are also important, this Pier 24 exhibit insists, and that is part of what makes it a great and true-to-photography show.