Monday, October 25, 2010

Night/Light in City Hall's Basement



Anchored by Stephen Thomson's now-iconic 2006 photo above, "Raccoons at the Legion of Honor," the San Francisco Art Commission and PhotoAlliance has installed an exhibit of night photography by a host of local artists in City Hall's basement.



The lighting is too bright and reflective in the ugly corridors near the Department of Elections, but the photographs are mostly wonderful, including Vanessa Marsh's eerie outdoor photographs (above) that look like an updated version of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" procession.



Oren Lukitz (above) has a trio of night shots on public beaches...



...Cynthia Wood captures "Nana" exhaling (above) and Lenny Greenwald (below) has a whole series of spooky photos taken on the abandoned Naval base of Mare Island.



The place looks genuinely haunted.

2 comments:

Greg said...

the raccoon picture has to be a Muni classic photo.

the many captions I've seen continue to crack me up. There was one along the lines of "we forgot our transfers. Also, we're raccoons"

Driver "Ah what the heck, get in!"

I don't know who came up with that but God bless 'em.

Civic Center said...

Dear Greg: When I first saw the raccoon photo on the local intertubes a few years ago, my first reaction was that it had to be a brilliant Photoshop effort, followed by the realization that no, this was probably real. It's a definite masterpiece of the found moment.