A SENSE OF PLACE Today, like never before, pictures are inescapable, blanketing every facet of dayto-day life, from advertisements and billboards to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Because our relationship to photography is both personal and universal, this medium more than any other defines how we view and understand the world. For its fifth exhibition, Pier 24 Photography presents A Sense of Place, an exploration of how photographs shape our perceptions of our surroundings. Together, the exhibited works suggest how we see through the lens of our own experience, our impressions shaped by emotional responses based in a felt connection between one’s own life and the pictured subject. Approaching the grand scale historically reserved for landscape paintings, photographs like Andreas Gurksy’s F1 Pit Stop III (Rm 04), Thomas Demand’s Grotto (Rm 10), and Jeff Wall’s In front of a nightclub (Rm 18) immerse the viewer in the pictured environment. Works from Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places (Rm 20) recall the spirit of anytown USA. In an adjacent gallery, Paul Graham’s The Present (Rm 09) captures continuous moments in the Manhattan landscape from various perspectives, mimicking how the eye shifts focus to pinpoint different details unfolding in one’s surroundings. Subjects similar to those considered by Shore and Graham are recognizable in Lee Friedlander’s America by Car (Rm 15), a series of photographs documenting both the everyday and specific eccentricities in the United States—all of them captured from the confines of his car. Unconventional technical processes and methods of display bring fresh perspectives on the commonplace. Referencing one of the oldest forms of photographic printing, Eric William Carroll’s diazotypes (Rm 08)—a form similar to blueprints—are produced at an unprecedented scale, creating an immersive experience of being in the woods. When photographing familiar Bay Area terrain, John Chiara’s (Rm 11) distinctive camera obscura process transforms images into otherworldly scenes. To create the installation 24 HRS in Photos, Erik Kessels (Rm 17) downloaded and printed every picture uploaded to Flickr during a 24-hour period, allowing the viewer to both visually and physically experience the overwhelming number of photographs shared online. Works drawn from the Sack Photographic Trust (Rms 12-14)—primarily from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century—reflect one collector’s sense of place. These three galleries present historical photographs in contemporary installations focusing on traditional themes that are well represented in the collection. Taken as a whole, the pictures assembled in A Sense of Place demonstrate what photography does best, drawing our attention to the everyday—and what we might otherwise bypass—and inspiring us to take another, closer look.
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