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Photo Booth The view from The New Yorker’s photo department. « Frames from Fiction: Phantom Sightings Main On and Off the Walls: W. Eugene Smith’s Bohemian Life » March 31, 2010
On and Off the Walls: A First Look at Pier 24 Posted by Whitney Johnson In six short years, Andrew Pilara has amassed over two thousand photographic works—from a Diane Arbus print, the first in his collection, to a grotesque Marilyn Minter video—and transformed a dilapidated pier beneath the Bay Bridge in San Francisco into one of the largest spaces for photography in the United States. Each work is installed without any caption information, so looking becomes an exercise in recognition and speculation, and ultimately conversation. And that’s just what occurred on a Saturday evening earlier this month, as thirty or so photographers, curators, picture editors, and professors of photography roamed the galleries: “Is that Pieter Hugo or Viviane Sassen?,” one asked. (It was actually Jackie Nickerson.) Allan Sekula or Vera Lutter? (Vera Lutter it was.) In some galleries, the scale of the collection—all fifty-two of Lee Friedlander’s “Little Screens”; all of “The Animals” by Garry Winogrand—overwhelmed the discussion. And though the view across the San Francisco Bay distracted the crowd momentarily, it was the work that held our attention. Pier 24 is scheduled to open to the public later this spring. Get a first look here, with selected commentary by director Christopher McCall. Slide 1 of 9 Previous | Next
This larger-than-life “Catherine of Aragon,” by Hiroshi Sugimoto, is installed alongside Henry VIII and his other five wives.