A long look down eerie ‘Corridors’
When Oakland photographer Steve Kahn came to Casemore Kirkeby to curate what would turn out be his final gallery exhibition, he stepped into the back room and said, “This will be all corridors.”
He meant that literally. Pictures of corridors hung in a corridor. In 1980, Kahn had made a study of empty and eerie hotel hallways on the seedy side of Hollywood, and he’d finally found the right place to show it. “Corridors” fits so well in this space that the images seem to have been site-specific. But Kahn died of cancer at age 74 in February and never got a chance to see it.
“This is all laid out how Steve wanted it,” says Petra Bibeau, gallery director at Casemore Kirkeby, on the ground floor of the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.
Kahn was a Los Angeles street shooter who was veering toward interiors when he got a commercial job as a photographer for a bondage magazine. The shoots were always booked in Hollywood hotel rooms, but “sometimes the woman would not show up for a shot,” says Bibeau, “so he started noticing the hotel transients.”
Kahn also started noticing the hallways — empty and grimy and poorly lit with one dim bulb suspended from the ceiling. He’d leave the room with a Polaroid camera he used to test his bondage shots, and these enlarged Polaroid images of hotel hallways became “Corridors,” a series he completed in 1980.
Gallery co-owner Stefan Kirkeby had not heard of this body of work when he visited Kahn to scout out the show. The seven images that would form “Corridors” were in a box, all unframed to indicate they had never been shown before. Kahn held up one set of Cibachrome prints mounted on aluminum to describe how he imagined them, installed into a corner of a gallery. It never happened until now.
After Kahn’s death, Kirkeby screwed together their aluminum frames and mounted them in the back corner at Casemore Kirkeby. When you look at the picture, titled “Corridor Corner,” it has the illusion of a hallway that goes on and on.
“His idea was to make photography sculptural,” says Bibeau. “It’s another dimension, like you could walk into a place with no end point.”
“Corridors” is in color, but the images are so dark they look black-and-white. They contrast with “Stasis,” a more conceptual body of work involving shutter speed variations and motion, in the main gallery.
The combined work is titled “Stasis, Corridors 1969-1980,” and neither part has ever had a gallery show in the Bay Area. It closes May 26, but there will be more Kahn to follow. The de Young Museum plans to open “Hollywood Suites” on Sept. 29 in its photography gallery.
“Steve Kahn coming to us out of nowhere really fulfills a vision of the photography that was being created in the 1970s and ’80s on the West Coast,” says Kirkeby. “His works stand very unique because he is looking at space and reinterpreting it a sculptural level.”
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art