Seen / Unseen

Years ago after being at Review Santa Fe, this might have been 2008 or 2009, I curated an invitational show at RayKo Photo Center in San Francisco, based on the work I'd seen at that review. I called it "Scene Unseen." Enough time has passed that I can only remember flickering images now, like an illuminated vacuum cleaner on a blue snow-covered frozen lake at night and another photograph of a perfectly square brown bush, a topiary gone wrong. When asked to jury this show, "Seen/Unseen," I thought of all the ways the world could look through a lens and all the small miracles that can happen thanks to the artists' creativity and vision and openness to magic.

It wasn't easy whittling down thousands of images to just sixty. Sixty moments that were unique and challenging and beautiful and dreamy and sometimes horrific and dark, but always something I hadn't seen. When I thought of my award winners, I thought of how a house at night could appear like a miniature diorama. Not real at all, but a construction in the smallest room (Bolko Stolberg). I thought of the times I'd been to Joshua Tree National Park and the great open lands of the West, but I never saw a figure draped and bound in the rocks. An apparition? Maybe (Sandra Hoover). And then there were moments that felt like film stills, flashes from a movie, images that if you looked back again, they wouldn't be there or if they were, you still wouldn't believe it (Lee Rogers). It's a wonderful journey, this show of light and shadow, dreams and reality, fleeting glimpses, poignant moments, tiny details of hair and hands and breath and holding that breath. The photographers have stopped time and made me look, not once, not twice, but again and again. And as Cartier-Bresson would tell you, there aren't many photographs that you can look at again and again.

Congratulations to all the artists and thank you for taking me on this journey with you!