Photographer’s scenes of S.F. propel ‘This Land’
To see five people on cell phones at once is not worthy of note in San Francisco. But to see five people in an empty plaza and to have them all on phones in a way that looks staged suggests either luck or a willingness to wait all day for that moment.
Or it is an indicator of raw talent, which is what made Pier 24 Photography director Chris McCall pull that one image from a portfolio review of maybe 500 pictures by 10 photographers. Titled simply “San Francisco, California Street, 2015,” by San Francisco Art Institute graduate student Daniel Postaer, it was purchased by McCall for the Pier 24 collection and became the surprise impetus for “This Land,” a major group exhibition that opened Friday, June 1, and will be up for 10 months.
The show is named for the Woody Guthrie song, and the premise is to examine this country’s social climate during the past 10 years. Eighteen photographers, both known and unknown, were each given a gallery room. Among the big names are Jim Goldberg, Richard Misrach, Alec Soth, Katy Grannan and Dawoud Bey. Among the small names is Postaer, who is getting his first museum or gallery exposure.
“From immediately seeing his work, it was clear that he had established his own voice, which is a hard thing to do in photography,” McCall said. “You see a lot of people who emulate masters, but Daniel has a voice that is unique.”
Postaer, 39, was already in his 30s and eight years into a career running the Los Angeles office of a Beijing entertainment company when the voice reached him. A night class in photography at UCLA got him to graduate school at the Art Institute, where he got his master’s degree in 2015.
“I’m a modern-day flaneur with a camera,” he said. “I walk these streets and observe time and place.”
So far, Pier 24 has bought just one of the seven prints in the show, but there is always room for more. The collection of Pier 24 founders Andy and Mary Pilara runs to more than 5,000 images, and the space for showing both their own and borrowed works is 28,000 square feet, making it the largest space in the world dedicated to showing photography, and the only free art museum in San Francisco.
Postaer’s seven San Francisco images are part of a body of work called “Boomtown.” He’s snapped thousands of pictures and is still out there.
“I only make prints of pictures I believe in,” he said while walking the streets, the wind fouling his cell reception. “Then I spend time with those prints, just to see how they age.”