Waves of meaning: Turning the Page at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco

Sound waves never disappear. Instead, they continue to ripple outwards into the ether, ever softer and lower, but never gone. This may be a strange thought to have in the midst of the cacophonous clusters and harmonious poise of the seventeen different galleries of Turning The Page at Pier 24 Photography about photobooks, but I’m going with it. Follow me: waves of sound, like rays of light, are recorded and absorbed for posterity on their respective media, and we enter into a specific relationship with time when we engage with each. Songs are short but they live much longer in our minds.  Images, many of them familiar, return to us with a radiant potency when in a new space. This is the last show at Pier 24 Photography, the end of this iteration of the Pilara Foundation. Rising waves lap beneath the weathered pier, steadily rising each year.  

The muted drone of traffic on the Bay Bridge still rumbles inside, mixing with the hushed voices of the few other visitors. For over a decade, this has been the experience in the museum, a rarified encounter with photographs, free and open to all who make reservations. Knowing that this too will end makes it all the more dear. There’s no way not to think about sound and light as different traces of time here, as Pier 24 will soon join a litany of arts institutions that have closed since 2020. 

Every photograph is a slip in time, marking the instantaneous shutter click, referencing the technical history of the medium itself, and broadcasting a message from the past to the future. Robert Frank’s Covered Car—Long Beach (1955, from The Americans) feels at this point like a nineteenth century European fantasy of the west: the modern stagecoach, exotic palm, pared down stucco hut in high contrast; while Zanele Muholis’s Somnyama Ngonyama reasserts the subject’s faceted agencies by vamping identities back against Frank’s implied colonial gaze. One seeks these Janus-like fusions, looking backward and forward simultaneously, throughout the exhibition. Questions arise: like how Ed Templeton’s relationship to his subject might differ from that of Jim Goldberg? Is it only that they focus on the raw gashed edges of youth subcultures, or could they also share a critical distance as photographers? And, similarly, I also found a formal affinity between Templeton’s work (cards on table: I grew up skateboarding, so Templeton was and is the touchstone of fusing art and skateboarding for my generation) and the hand-colored black and white photographs of Vasantha Yogananthan’s  “A Myth of Two Souls.” Is there also a peculiar kinship in the shared pastoral tradition, linking the leitmotifs of the American South in Curran Hatleberg’s River’s Dream and the Black subjects in Donovan Smallwood’s Languor seen at ease in Central Park? Both, after all, trace their roots back to the Civil War.  Disembodied from their pages, these photos flash with theatrical intensity, mooting such queries. As Los Angeles burns down south, the mural-sized selections from Rinko Kawauchi’s Ametsuchi (2012–13) sharpens the delicate tangencies between land stewardship and environmental despoliation. 

What I’m getting at is that these precious places for looking at art, for celebrating the history and ubiquity of the photobook in this case, are never hermetic spaces of retreat from the world outside. They are controlled settings where reality is vividly distilled into jolting flashes. I wish they could stay. The photo gallery is spatial, the photobook is haptic. Pier 24’s last show underscores that these experiences of this kind of encounter are disappearing, threatened by rising rents and waters alike. The skateboarder in me was proud to see Ed Templeton’s name alongside canonical masters of the genre and some of the newest and most exciting practitioners in the world, yet also knows never to trust such hierarchies. Entropy should not be resisted, but emphatically embraced. The book itself is equally dear, as Libby Black’s sculptures of the photobooks suggest, and that scarce, solitary time of engagement and reflection engendered by the book is also precarious. The page turns, and these images echo softer and softer through spaces that vanish.

Turning the Page
Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA
April 15, 2024 to January 31, 2025

This review was made possible thanks to the generous support of Pier 24 Photography.