Through March 26 - Alec Soth: A Pound of Pictures at Fraenkel Gallery
I'm back after winter hiatus to blog again, and to urge you to see Alec Soth's show of photographs at Fraenkel if you're in SF. I have been following Soth's work ever since I moved the Bay Area, and his ability to capture moments of perfect beauty and tenderness in our off-kilter world remains unsurpassed. Taken during the last few years these images feel especially poignant given our ongoing global crisis, though there are also humorous touches that never come at the expense of his subjects. Interspersed throughout the exhibition are snapshots from Soth's own collection, creating a rich conversation about the practice of photography itself and what might be considered art-worthy. Similarly the gallery has curated a room full of Friedlander, Goldin, Arbus, and the like at the end of the show that demonstrates Soth's influences and his place among them.
Other things I liked this week:
- The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman, Chez Jolie Coiffure, and Delphine’s Prayers by Rosine Mbakam. Born in Cameroon and based in Belgium, Mbakam creates extraordinary documentaries centered around women and sometimes around her own family to illuminate both the female and the immigrant experience.
- Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. A quietly exquisite trio of short films thematically linked by longing and loss and fate.
- Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs by Kenneth R. Rosen. Rather than an exhaustive exposé of these highly problematic programs, Rosen concentrates on the personal accounts of four former teens whose lives decidedly were not changed for the better by them.
- San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory's virtual Birdy Hours have been a balm throughout pandemic, and Thursday's talk with writer and biologist Maya Khosla was full of her observations about wilderness recovery after wildfire. In a time when I continue to grapple with our climate catastrophe reality it was wonderful to see how wild lands can burst with new life.
- And they both close today but spending some quality time with the Leonard Cohen pieces by Marshall Trammell and Candice Breitz at the Contemporary Jewish Museum yesterday did my soul a lot of good too.