California photography has long been an archive of the landscape. From Ansel Adams and the Group f/64 to contemporary experimentalists like Chris McCaw and Meghann Riepenhoff, who have both allowed nature to directly imprint itself on their photographs through long exposures and cameraless techniques. But what does that archive look like when we allow for an expanded definition of landscape, considering further how the landscape imprints us?
FORECAST 2024, this year’s edition of San Francisco photography nonprofit SF Camerawork’s annual juried members exhibition, is a survey of contemporary photography, with an eye toward local artists and emergent trends. Four of this year’s exhibiting artists are Californians, three local to the Bay Area. All activate landscape—traditional, experimental, and figurative—in new and nuanced ways.
Tiago Da Cruz’s process-based prints are at once some of the most traditional and the most experimental landscapes in the show. Bearing poetic titles like A Wave is a Scalding Kiss or The Cosmos Reflected, both 2024, silver gelatin prints made with solar and lunar light abstract their subjects beyond recognition, in colorful, hazy approximations of rippling water and caked earth. The pictures feel at once micro- and macro-cosmic, undermining the viewer’s sense of scale in a deft, sublime gesture.
While techniques like these tap into photographic traditions (think Anna Atkins), the disorientation they create via abstraction makes for an embodied experience of viewing that maps onto the experience of nature – vast and incomprehensible.
Lynse A. Cooper’s sampling of silver gelatin prints range from composed portraiture to landscape shots, but none of them quite straightforward. An untitled double exposure of stony bluffs surrounded by roiling tides has been engraved in pencil with the words “tired” and “fading” in a delicate cursive, hinting at how the landscape both effects and reflects human experience. In the most ambitious, a silver enlargement of a 35mm negative strip containing two pictures of the tide lapping against the beach hangs above a pedestal holding a circular arrangement of small stones.
Takming Chuang’s works are also sculptural in nature, including photographic elements in unexpected fashion. One piece features a metal drying rack scattered with mango skins, two holding cutout photographic portraits. In another, folded snapshots themselves support the wire frame of a soaking rack, littered with ink rubbings and small, ceramic forms. The sculptural quality of these pieces furthers a distinctly embodied viewing experience that had me, at one point, on hands and knees trying to peer inside Chuang’s folded snapshots.
As topography takes personal turns here, other artists in the show explore ways in which interiority can expand outward into the fabric of social space.
Nina Tanujaya’s 2023 series “Pulang” presents quiet, color scenes from the artist’s family home. There are portraits—My Parents and Kirana waking up—but even deeper intimacy comes from photographs of household objects. Grandpa’s answering machine shows the titular device amidst the clutter of a small table: a notebook, a dirty mug, a medicine bottle, a basket of miscellaneous papers and chargers, a lamp with a note clipped to the shade. Another photograph shows orange peels and mahjong tiles scattered across a floral textile, with a snapshot of a woman dozing on a couch. These feel like signposts to a private world, the archaic cartography of a familiar space for unfamiliar eyes.
Vanessa Woods’s collages, made from her own pictures of the body parts of herself, her husband and their children are a surreal exploration into relationality. In Boxed #1 (2024), Woods has re-photographed a sculpture collage of a child’s leg emerging from a box made from photos of other flesh. Each One of Us was Fastened to the Other (2020), a large-scale grid of smaller collages of disparate body parts, presents an uncanny geography of interconnectedness and (dis)location, suggesting a topography of family.
Many of Jesse Egner’s also consider bodies, foregrounding queer identity with a sense of playfulness. In Lite-Brite (2021), for instance, a nude figure sits on the edge of a bed holding, at crotch level, a Lite-Brite sporting a multi-colored penis design, at once offering a tender portrait and the photographic equivalent of prop-comedy. By contrast, Hidden (2023), is an introspective vista, rife with the tension between those contradictory descriptors. Two figures crouch facing each other, huddled beneath a white illuminated from within, against a backdrop of barren, dusky desert.
Again, I was returned to my own body, my physical experience of the exhibition and the way I moved through it in relation to the bodies—human and geographic—on display.
Visiting FORECAST 2024 put me in mind of the seminal 1975 exhibition New Topographics. That show signaled a shift in landscape photography, amplifying artists like Robert Adams and Bernd and Hilla Becher who were refocusing their lenses to examine the human impact on the world around them. FORECAST offers yet another expanded view of topographies.
Photographers like Group f/64 distanced themselves from nature in presenting their awe of it and a show like New Topographics documented human disruption enacted on the natural environment. By contrast—or extension—this year’s FORECAST cohort embodies landscape as a thing felt, not merely captured or subsumed. In what ways can an exhibition be a landscape of human life? Or a body, as a thing that is negotiated by ourselves and others? What is the topography of the shared space between us all, both physical and archival, and how do we navigate it?
FORECAST 2024
SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA
July 16, 2024 to September 7, 2024
This review was made possible thanks to the generous support of Pier 24 Photography.