There is a wonderful new place to see photography in San Francisco. Well, it’s not exactly new — I think it may have been around for two years or more — but it’s such a well-kept secret that it’s new even to many of us who live in the Bay Area. It’s Pier 24, a private, beautiful, free gallery that I never noticed on my frequent Embarcadero walks until I actually had an appointment to go inside.
That’s the catch: you have to make an appointment. And since only 20 people are allowed in during any given two-hour period, the appointments can be hard to get, especially since the gallery is only open Monday through Thursday and bookings are limited to a 30-day period. But if you keep checking the Pier 24 website as relentlessly as you check your favorite restaurant, eventually you will be rewarded with a reservation. And your visit will be worth every minute of the time and energy you spent getting it.
The collection of photographs hanging on the walls of this soothingly quiet, masterfully converted space varies several times each year, and at the moment the show is called “A Sense of Place.” This is landscape photography in the widest sense of the term. It includes everything from a whole roomful of Lee Friedlander’s photos taken from his car, to Carleton Watkins’s and Ansel Adams’s Yosemite photos, to a rather moving video by Doug Aitken called “House.” Also sprinkled throughout these twenty small rooms are a number of classic Robert Adams photos in black and white, a range of huge, colorful Andreas Gurskys, a healthy selection of not-quite-identical Paul Graham pairings, a series of barely-distinguishable-from-real Thomas Demand constructs, and much else besides. The hang is extremely intelligent: for instance, a Jeff Wall illuminated glass box showing a line of people waiting for a nightclub adjoins a captivating Veronika Kellndorfer photo of a Neutra beach house, printed on a big glass sheet that projects forward from the wall. Yet technical novelty is not the only thing being celebrated here. My favorite part of the whole show is a series of three rooms borrowed from the Paul Sack Collection, featuring straightforwardly marvelous work from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including great Atgets, Kerteszes, Moholy Nagys, and other urban masterpieces.
I am able to identify all these pictures not through my superior knowledge of photography and not because of any captions or wall identifications—Pier 24 scrupulously avoids these—but because I questioned the helpful curators who are strewn around the exhibition space. This is one of the great things about this particular gallery. It asks you to look at the photos as images in themselves, detached from their maker or their title, and it makes you work to get the IDs if you feel you really must have them. There is a little bit of helpful material that is printed up for you to hold in your hand as you stroll around, but for the most part you are required to use your eyes and your brain—almost as if you were encountering these photographs as found objects, as living landscapes in themselves, rather than as designated, valuable works of art. It is a triumph of curatorship over commercial consumption — a personally owned, expensively acquired photography collection transformed, in each exhibition, into something that creates a direct connection between the photograph and the individual viewer. Pier 24 is a gallery that blurs the line between public and private, giving us the best of both.