San Francisco Arts Monthly: “Retro Images, Angst-Infused Paintings and Word Play”

SF Examiner: “Plastic cameras reveal the cheap and cheerful”

By: Lauren Gallagher | 02/01/12 8:15 PM
Special to The SF Examiner

Less is more: “San Fernando Valley,” shot by Thomas Alleman with a Holga camera, is among the images on view in a fun show at RayKo Photo Center.

Never underestimate the power and pleasures of a cheap toy camera. The humble hunks of plastic have a magic, mystery and whimsy that cannot be duplicated, not even by tech-savvy iPhone app impersonators like the Hipstamatic.

RayKo Photo Center’s fifth annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show, on view through March 6, celebrates the versatility of the medium with impressive results.

A white wedding dress rests on a faceless mannequin, posed in a storefront window. Other dresses, hangers and shop miscellany float across the photo like ghosts, with the city street reflected in the glass. Though it looks as if it could be by pioneering early-20th-century photographer Eugene Atget, Jacqueline Walters of San Francisco took the photo with a Holga, a camera invented in the early 1980s.

The Holga and its big sister, the Diana, seem to be the most favored cameras in the show, perhaps because an actual vintage camera is no longer required. Reproductions of these and other plastic toy cameras are widely available, continuing the lineage of their pleasantly fickle results.

Part of the fetishistic appeal of cheaply manufactured cameras lies in the complete uniqueness of each image. No two pictures are alike, and the results are unpredictable. The bare-bones plastic manufacturing is far from airtight, often allowing light to access the pre-developed film.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/fine-arts/2012/02/plastic-cameras-reveal-cheap-and-cheerful#ixzz1lM0M7Bfm

Read full article here.

SFGate: Exhibitions skirt mainstream via photo technology– Kenneth Baker

Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic, Thursday, July 14, 2011

When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted a symposium last year titled “Is Photography Over?” I thought it a premature, if not gratuitous, provocation. But several current Bay Area exhibitions have me wondering.

The Haines Gallery’s “Science of Sight: Alternative Photography” assembles work by 13 artists from three continents. Each participant deliberately deviates from the methods, tools and rationales conventional in the photographic mainstream.

RayKo Photo Center has in its gallery “No Mirrors: A Juried Show of Camera-less Photography,” another sampling of work by people both local and international.

Marco Breuer, who also appears in “Science of Sight,” has a solo show at the de Young Museum titled “Line of Sight” that sets photographic works among other light-sensitive objects and things drawn from the museum collections with associative connections to the camera and photographs.

Suddenly artists everywhere seem to be looking for things to do with photographic technology besides shooting pictures.

Read more

SFBG: Benefit Wed. 7/13 for hikers imprisoned in Iran

07.12.11 – 3:41 pm | Rebecca Bowe |

Shane Bauer, a Bay Area photojournalist, will spend his 29th birthday in Iran’s Evin Prison on July 13.

He has languished in prison along with his close friend, Josh Fattal, ever since they were detained July 31, 2009 while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian border. Bauer’s fiancee, Sarah Shourd, was detained with them too, but was released from prison last September after spending 410 days in solitary confinement.

Shourd is joining with friends and supporters of Bauer on July 13 to host a benefit at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco in support of ongoing efforts to push for Bauer and Fattal’s release.

The event will feature a reception and presentation of Bauer’s work. According to a press advisory, the evening is also being planned to recognize “the contributions of all the photojournalists who put their safety on the line to tell important and overlooked stories.”

Bauer wrote for publications such as The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Christian Science Monitor. A photojournalist who has won multiple awards and had his work published internationally, he’s documented everything from tenant conditions in San Francisco SROs to conflict-ridden regions in Africa and the Middle East. Bauer also wrote an article for the Guardian about an Oakland residence that is famous among East Bay anarchists.

There will be a screening of a new video made about his work, as well as a film Bauer produced with David Martinez documenting a group of armed rebels in Darfur. Speakers at the event will include Kim Komenich, a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer who supports the Dart Center, an organization that works with journalists who suffer PTSD; Lou Dematteis, a former Reuters staff photographer who was based in Nicaragua during the US-backed Contra War; and Shon Meckfessel, a friend of the trio of hikers who nearly accompanied them on the trek in Iraqi Kurdistan but stayed behind because he was feeling ill, thus escaping captivity in Iran.

In Iran, a trial has been set for Bauer and Fattal on July 31, a full two years after they were taken into custody.

Earlier this month, their families of Bauer and Fattal released a statement calling for an end to the nightmare that began when the young men were first detained.

“Iran knows Shane and Josh are innocent and so does the world, which is watching how the Iranian authorities treat this case very closely,” the statement said. “Shane and Josh are being held without any due process and their mental and physical welfare is in grave danger. Their suffering needs to end now and they should be allowed to return home immediately.”

The event will be held Wednesday, July 13, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Rayko Photo Center, 428 Third Street, S.F. (Presentation starts at 7:15.) For more information, visit freethehikers.org, facebook.com/FreetheHikers, and twitter.com/freethehikers.

Original Article can be found here.

SF Gate: “Signs that you are in the Bay Area” – Leah Garchik

– On July 13, the 29th birthday of Shane Bauer, about 100 photographers and friends gathered at RayKo Photo Center for a Free Shane Bauer birthday celebration and fundraiser. Bauer was arrested in Iran two years ago, along with Josh Fattal, and held on charges of espionage. Bauer’s fiancee, Sarah Shourd, was also arrested, but was freed in September. Bauer and Fattal’s trial is set for July 31 in Iraq. RayKo co-director Mia Nakano says a few hundred dollars were raised, for legal fees. But the larger purpose of the evening was to “highlight Shane’s incredible photography” and “to send one more reminder that Shane and Josh have not been forgotten.”

Read more

The Bold Italic – “Flash Dance” The Photo Booths of SF

By Kristin Smith.

Any true photo booth connoisseur needs to take a trip to RayKo Photo Center on 3rd Street. The entryway of the building houses a gorgeous Model 9 booth, which, depending on who you ask is either from 1947 or 1949. Either way, it’s 40 years older than any other booth I came across in the city. It’s so old that it hasn’t even been retrofitted to take dollar bills and you have to give your $3 to the receptionist, who, in turn, hands you a token that she thinks might be made on site by the wild guys who like to work on the old beauty.

Caring for this relic is a real labor of love, and its clear that RayKo is staffed with people who enjoy the job. You can’t get parts for the machine anymore, so someone’s always welding it back together or adding makeshift pieces to keep it running. And it runs great—at least the day I was there. The pictures have a vintage sepia tone to them and this booth captures motion better than any other I found.

Luis Mendoza, a RayKo employee, showed me the inside of the machine. It’s a mess of wires, chemicals, and metal and with this intimidating and potentially dangerous mixture, I began to understand why most of the booths have gone digital. He told me that the chemicals are harsher and less diluted in the booth than a normal photo lab, and that a few months ago, a splash of chemicals almost cost him his sight.

Mendoza puts a token in, and with the door open we watch the process together. At first I worried that seeing the process from the inside would ruin the mystique. That some how knowing that the clicking sounds are the metal arm dunking the strip into the various baths will make a photo booth seem more scientific and less magical. But it only heightened my appreciation of the machine. After all, here is a full photo lab, hidden within a booth small enough to fit in the back of a dive bar.

Read more about S.F.’s photo booths.

SF Weekly: No Mirrors

The World Is My Camera
By Keith Bowers

Film is said to be a dying medium, and Christopher Colville took that to heart. He laid out a piece of photo paper and on it he placed a decomposing squid. The only light source was the natural phosphorescence given off by the animal as its body broke down. The result is a bizarre underwater dreamscape in black, blue, and white — like a San Jose Sharks logo on LSD. On several other photo sheets — we’re guessing he wanted to make sure the medium was dead — he put gunpowder and ignited it. The visual results are (literally) an explosion of gray, white, and brown. Through still another piece he shot a bullet. What was he doing? Several variations of cameraless photography for the exhibition “No Mirrors.” Photography without cameras goes back a long way. Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray was among the early artists to use it by placing ordinary objects in front of chemically treated paper and then exposing it to light. Gallery director Ann Jastrab says she was expecting rudimentary things such as this but got a lot more. [[[TK]]] made what’s called a cyanotype (so named because its chemicals give it a blue hue) by placing a person and some vegetation on a 72-inch piece of photo paper. Jastrab says that even in direct midday sunlight, that was probably a 20-minute exposure, so the model had to be still for that amount of time. The model doesn’t appear to be stationary — in fact she appears to be flying through tree branches. Such surprises occur throughout the exhibit. “People really went for it,” she says. “It’s better than I could ever have imagined.” The squid, however, won’t be around to see it.

PDN’s Benefiting from Portfolio Reviews: How To Stay In Touch

By Jacqueline Tobin

© Christopher Colville
A triptych by Christopher Colville, who landed a show at Rayko Photo Center after a review at Photolucida.

Recently, we talked to experienced portfolio reviewers about the most effective presentation methods and follow-up promos they have seen from photographers they’ve met on the portfolio circuit [See “Right Stuff: Making the Most of the Portfolio Review," PDN July.] Here more reviewers share their stories of photographers who got their attention, and then maintained their connection long after the 20-minute critique is long over. Each had their own opinions, however, about how they prefer to be contacted.

At the end of a review, photographers typically hand over a sample of their work—a promo card, a CD, a small booklet—as a leave-behind the reviewer can take home. Ann Jastrab, gallery director of Rayko Photo Center of San Francisco, tells photographers, “Keep in mind that most of the material we get is hard to bring back because we get so much of it.”

She jokes, “Unfortunately the leave behinds often get left behind” especially if more than a dozen photographers give them booklets, cards and CDs. Her advice to photographers: “Instead, follow up with me a few days or a few weeks later with an eye-catching 4 x 6 postcard that has an iconic image on the front and your contact information on the back. That works best for me.”

Jastrab, a frequent reviewer at Photolucida, Photo Alliance in San Francisco, and Review LA among others, says that the images that really wow her on a mailed card get pinned up on her office wall. It also helps her figure out which images might work together in a group show. For example, Rayko currently has a juried show of camera-less photography on view called “No Mirrors” that features work by nearly 50 artists from around the world. Christopher Colville is one of them.

Read more…

SF Gate: ‘No Mirrors,’ opens June 16

By Mary Eisenhart

Thursday, June 16, 2011

RayKo Photo Center

Zus Stapel shows that you don’t need a camera to make a picture.

You don’t need a camera – film or digital – to capture light and make an image. Such is the premise underlying this exhibition, in which artists find ways to exploit decaying organisms, falling bodies, saliva, explosions and odd artifacts – along with more recognizable media – in the photographic craft.

Reception 6 tonight. Through Aug. 2. 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Fri.-Sun. RayKo Photo Center, 428 Third St., S.F. (415) 495-3773. www.raykophoto.com.

- Mary Eisenhart, 96hours@sfchronicle.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/15/NST01JREGP.DTL#ixzz1Q8h63iax

Lomography’s Photo Labs Guide

Thanks Lomography.com for adding RayKo to their list of US Photo Labs!

CNet does Analog: “International Juried Plastic Camera Show”

Teen hipsters discover joys of analog photography

AN FRANCISCO–Carolyn LaHorgue might seem like the type of teenager who would embrace digital technology. She designed her own Web site, is a Facebook aficionado, and is planning to study media and communications at New York University this fall.

Yet the 17-year-old, who lives just north of San Francisco, totes around an artifact right out of the 19th century: an analog camera that uses actual film. “It represents the individualist lifestyle,” LaHorgue says.

LaHorgue is not alone. Teenagers are leading a kind of backward transition, leaving digital devices behind, at least temporarily, for technology their grandparents pioneered.

Classic film cameras, such as Holga, Diana, Minolta, and Nikon, are being chosen over smaller-than-your-fist digital point-and-shoots on the theory that it’s cool to struggle with manual aperture settings. Or it’s rebellious to scope out the best lighting for a shot.

A popular clothing chain among teenagers, Urban Outfitters, has picked up on the trend and now offers more than 60 product combinations relating to cameras, which are overwhelmingly film-based.

“Everyone has a fascination with the past,” says Alana Shaw, 18, of San Francisco, who has been accepted at Bard College, adding that her peers “are reverting back to more vintage technologies as a way to express their personal taste.”

Film cameras live on among urban hipsters (photos)

“Digital photography allows for no mistakes by the camera,” Shaw says. “The picture is flawless, and you are the only one to blame for its apparent ugliness. But with film, you never really know what’s going to happen. It’s a surprise every time you develop and print your film. Sometimes there can be weird color granulations, random light splotches or double exposures.”

Though the trend has been building for several years, it’s now hitting its stride. While total sales of film cameras lag behind their digital counterparts, something odd is happening that would have recently been seen as inconceivable: digital camera sales are decreasing, and sales of analog cameras are increasing.

The Photo Marketing Association’s most recent report (PDF) on U.S. camera sales from September 2010 says digital camera sales dropped 2 percent between the summer of 2009 and 2010, perhaps because the market was becoming saturated. Analog camera sales increased from 30 percent to 40 percent during that time, the PMA calculates, with much of the increase coming from instant camera purchases.

A popular iPhone app called Instagram mimics old-school film “flaws” but with the ease of digital. Another iPhone app does the same for videos, making them look like vintage home movies. There’s even an International Juried Plastic Camera Show–analog, of course–now in its fourth year.

Read more

SFGates: 5 Things in April

San Francisco: Toy cameras aren’t just throwaways. They cost $25 to $45, and the images are all creatively flawed, as can be seen at the 4th International Juried Plastic Camera Show Through April 30. Rayko Photo Center, 428 Third St. (415) 495-3773. www.raykophoto.com.

By Sam Whiting.
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Flavorpill: 4th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show

“This exhibit at the respected photo center is composed entirely of images taken on cheap plastic cameras — you know, the kind where light leaks and cloudy lenses are just par for the course. What photographers get in return for showing love to the plastic camera: unpredictable, lo-fi, often hauntingly beautiful images. Just for tonight, put away your Hipstamatic iPhone app and appreciate the real deal of what the plastic camera can do.” 

–Bonnie Chan, Flavorpill

Dwell: Rayko’s Plastic Camera Show

If you’re in San Francisco this Friday, stop by RayKo Photo Center for the opening reception of their 4th International Juried Plastic Camera Show—featuring images by 80 different photographers from around the world, including Thomas Alleman, Sam Grant, and Michelle Bates (author of the book “Plastic Cameras: Toying with Creativity”). In this age of Hipstamatic iPhone apps and Photoshop effects, it’s refreshing to see images produced with film and actual analog cameras. The pieces will be on display through April 30th. I myself just receieved one of Lomography’s latest plastic cameras—the Diana Mini En Rose—which I plan on taking out for a spin soon, and sharing on Dwell.com. In the meantime, here is some plastic camera inspiration.

By Jaime Gross
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7X7′s: The Best Of SF 2010: 87 Reasons Why We Love This City

“52. the city’s oldest photo booth at Rayko Photo Center” — 7×7.com

Past Press: 4th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show

RayKo’s Fourth Annual Juried Plastic Camera Show includes strange and stunning images made by the winners of this competition. Photographers from all over the Bay Area as well as national and international entries are featured in this dynamic exhibit. There were even more entries than last year, yet somehow we whittled it down to fewer than ninety compelling pieces. Why does the plastic camera continue to be so popular? Is it because the toy camera is a backlash to this digital age of photography? It could be nostalgia for the soft, square pictures with vignetted edges. It could just be nostalgia for film and the latent image- you actually have to wait to see what you shot! Or it could be love of the creak of the cheap plastic dial as you wind it, wondering if it will break off. (Forget the Hipstamatic app, this is the real deal). It could be too that we all missed the simple freedom of making pictures that aren’t perfect, that don’t have to be sharp or real or saturated or taken with a camera that costs thousands of dollars. All you need is $35 (or less) and a roll of film, and you’re in business…

– Carmel.com

SFGate: The Last Kodachrome’ through Jan. 21

December 30, 2010|By Mary Eisenhart

* show
The works of 23 photographers will be part of a final tribute to Kodachrome color film.
Credit: Justin Maxon

Paul Simon wrote a song about it. They named a park after it. And the photography world went into mourning last year when Kodak discontinued “the most beautiful color film ever made” after a 74-year run, most of it as an industry standard. As of the new year, Kodak will no longer process it. In mournful celebration, this juried show features 23 photographers’ works that show the film to best advantage.

Through Jan. 21. 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Fri.-Sun. Check website for holiday hours. RayKo Photo Center & Gallery, 428 Third St., S.F. (415) 495-3773. www.raykophoto.com.

SFGate: Photography show ‘Last Kodachrome’ end of an era

December 25, 2010|By Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer

* slide film

Pat Willard bought forty rolls of Kodachrome when he first found out that the film would have been discontinued last year, and as of early December, he is down to his last three rolls at his residency in Redwood City, Calif. on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2010. Willard has four prints presented at the Rayko Gallery in a show entitled “The Last Kodachrome” dedicated to the film’s 74-year history.
Credit: Kirsten Aguilar / The Chronicle

The photography show is called “The Last Kodachrome” but the last Kodachrome images aren’t in the show. They are still in Pat Willard’s Nikon camera.

They will have to come out by next week because the last lab in the world that processes the famed color film, Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan., is discontinuing it at the end of the year. The last rolls to be processed must be there by noon, Dec. 30. After 75 years, all that will be left of Kodachrome is the Paul Simon song, and a state park named after it in Utah.

There will still be a sister film called Ektachrome, but Willard, a fine art photographer in Redwood City, is not buying it.

SF Weekly’s: Best Black-and-White Photo Booth – 2010

It’s easy to sail right past the gray, no-nonsense facade of Rayko Photo Center, but step inside and you’ll be transported. The interior is wide and airy, all high ceilings, exposed wooden beams, and brick walls. Stationed in one corner is a vintage photo booth. The big, monochromatic machine can be operated only with little gold tokens ($3) purchased from the attendant. Pull your partner inside, choose a black or white background, and strike a pose. Then sit and listen while the photos develop with a series of cartoony clunks and whirs. The finished product, still wet with chemicals, spews out of a slit in a round metal orb inside the booth. The strip of stark portraits has an ethereal, otherworldly character, and each image is slightly different from the next. They’ve got that rare quality digital photography can’t master: imperfection.

–SFWeekly.com

Past Press: “Skeleton in the Closet”

By Jonathan Curiel Wednesday, Aug 25 2010

Fritz Liedtke offers a counterpoint to popular culture’s glorification of Angelina Jolie and her fellow fit-and-skinny vixens: photos of women with eating disorders. Even better, he lets them tell their stories with short and poignant essays, as with 19-year-old Em, who says her own mother was an anorexic who badgered her “every morning” about her weight. At RayKo Photo Center, Em stares ahead while an older woman — presumably her mom — lurks in the background. Liedtke’s photos are arresting, but what really makes “Skeleton in the Closet” stand out are the confessionals — testimony by young and old alike about what it’s like to live with a serious eating disorder. The only thing wrong: There isn’t enough of “Skeleton in the Closet” at RayKo. Six average-sized images from a photographer’s formidable project are just too small to make a big impact. Visit the photos, which are part of the exhibition “(Por)trait Revealed.”

Past Press: SFWeekly’s Wednesday’s Pick

“(Por)trait Revealed”

Rayko Photo Center

Reception 6 p.m., free

By Michael Leaverton, Wed., Jul. 28 2010 @ 7:35AM

Your refrigerator reveals a lot about you. We’ve always known this, in a medicine-cabinet sort of way, but it took artist Mark Menjivar to really freak us out. He traveled around the country with a large-format 8-by-10 camera, quickly opened the doors of people’s refrigerators, blocked any tidying or culling, and snapped away. The open-door portraits in “You Are What You Eat,” with accompanying bits of biographical text, are enlightening, sometimes damnably so. We know the bartender in Texas should stop whatever it is he has been doing, because he cannot stop buying takeout and shoving the leftovers into his fridge; he is bricking the thing up with Styrofoam containers. His mother would be appalled. We know to avoid the single person from San Antonio on a $432 fixed income, since in toto he has only a jar of mayo and a mysterious black plastic bag. There’s not as much beer as you would think in the portraits, except in the fridge of some San Diego filmmakers — way to drink, documentary filmmakers who raise money for Ugandan children! Organics and vegetables are satisfyingly present, but perhaps too much in the home of a couple who decided to limit themselves to locally grown vegetables just a week prior. One couple evidently swears by a milk and apple diet, another has a frozen rattlesnake, and another is freezing a deer in little baggies. “You Are What You Eat” is part of the group exhibit “(Por)trait Revealed,” which features work by more than 70 photographers.

–SFWeekly.com

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Past Press: SF Appeal’s Events

On the corner of Harrison and 3rd Street, between a parking lot and the freeway overpass is Rayko Photo Center, a building and business that stands alone in San Francisco.

What: Into…
the distance
repose
self
compassion
the depth
the everyday
Where: Rayko Photo Center, Side Gallery 428 3rd St
When: 6.25 – 7.18 Tues-Thurs 10a-10p, Fri-Sun 10a-8p. Opening Reception Friday, 6.25, 6-8p
Cost: Free

Not content to be just a state-of-the-art provider of photo printing services, Rayko also offers a full roster of classes, programs for young artists, an artist-in-residence program and three gallery spaces.

Don’t forget the store, full of great prints and photography equipment of all kinds. The clean and well designed space is flanked by brick walls, warm woods and lengthy hallway exhibition spaces. It’s an ideal location to look at and make art.

Into…
the distance
repose
self
compassion
the depth
the everyday features work by Yuri Boyko, Steve E. Chapman, Kevin B. Jones and Ignacy Zulawski. Each of these artists (who are relatively unknown to San Francisco, or at least to this writer’s tiny view of San Francisco) wisely employs the full potential of photography’s medium to open up their varied subject matter in unique ways.

While you are soaking it up at the reception, check out the additional exhibitions in the main gallery, Between, work by collaborative artists Julie Anand and Damon Sauer and Epigraph, artist books by the one and only Luis Delgado-Qualtrough.

Anand and Sauer busy themselves cutting up large scale photographs and then meticulously reassembling them in sweet eye candy patterns. Luis Delgado-Qualtrough’s artist books are both critical deconstructions books and visual testaments to their seemingly sacred value.

Image courtesy of Steve Chapman, Blue Tile Special (Archival Pigment Print from an iPhone)
Article by by Aimee Le Duc

Past Press: Gentlemen Shooters

By Michael Leaverton Wednesday, Jul 9 2008

If a camera could steal your soul, it would not be a Coolpix. It would be something big and metallic and smoky, a machine from the golden age of photography that had to be tended to like it was an angry locomotive, and it would definitely not be embedded in a cell phone. The darkroom technology would have a name invoking Industrial Age nostalgia, like “the Wet-Plate Collodion Process,” which, according to the RayKo Photo Center, involves “coating an enameled metal (Ferrotype or Tintype) or glass (Ambrotype) plate with a collodion mixture” — the definition then gets incomprehensible. The fact is, many photographers still use the W.P.C, since the 150 year-old technology produces incredible looking pictures, with a milky-metallic glow that captures the depths of the soul, making everything, portrait or landscape, look timeless, mysterious, and a little bit famous. Who doesn’t want that? Today, the venue presents a group show of expert collodion photographers titled “Into the Ether.” Among the more spirited artists is John Coffer, a one-time traveling portrait tintype photographer who now lives off the land in a cabin he built, taking photos of what’s outside. Also contributing is American history re-enactor Will Dunniway, cowboy-photographer Robb Kendrick, and many more.

July 18-Aug. 28, 2008

Past Press: “You Pinhole”

By Michael Leaverton Wednesday, Apr 23 2008

People who use pinhole cameras often seem cooler than other people, and they are. To make one, pretty much all you need to do is finish your box of oatmeal. Instead of a glass lens you use a small hole. Your shutter is a flap. Da Vinci is your inspiration (“O what a point is so marvelous!” he said about the hole). To celebrate WorldWide Pinhole Photography Day, RayKo is offering pinhole workshops, as well as an opening reception for pinhole photographers Kath Kreisher and Rebecca Rome and winners from the “Juried Pinhole Photography Exhibition.” And starting at noon, a rolling, multiple-aperture camera obscura, otherwise known as a bus, is pulling up to the photo center and giving people free rides. You sit in it and watch a 360-degree, animated projection of the world passing on the windows, which are blacked out and covered with little holes — pinholes — as you listen to the work of sound artists Colleen Burke and Walter Sipser, who make music for every city the bus camera visits.

The Bus Obscura starts giving rides at noon.
April 24-June 3, 2008

Past Press: Hobo Filmmaker Bill Daniel’s Art Exhibit in SF

Photographer and scrappy experimental filmmaker Bill Daniel has been traveling the country in his sailvan. A 1965 Chevy with a fine set of schooner sails on top, the van is dramatic, strange, and gorgeous, like most of Daniel’s work — including the photographs in his new photography exhibit, “Sunset Scavenger.”

Four years ago, Daniel and partner Vanessa Renwick walked up Third Street toward an empty warehouse. They looked shell-shocked, angry, and afraid: It was March 2003, and the United States had just landed soldiers on Iraqi soil. The two artists were pissed-off and demoralized, but continued into the building to put the finishing touches on their massive art show, “Pretty Gritty.” The atmosphere at the art opening would be hazy with grief, and that night, the city would explode with noise, people, and helicopters. But “Pretty Gritty” was a success, allowing Daniel to finish his decades-old project, a film about railroad graffiti called Who Is Bozo Texino? The sailvan was there, too, with someone’s film screening on its proud canvas. Daniel’s current crop of large-scale photos appears in the same building, now a sleek photographic center, and the artist makes the point that we’re still in the war.

“Sunset Scavenger” includes some impressive prints, including 8-by-10s, some 2-foot, some 5-foot, and one 10-foot gelatin silver prints of black-and-white photographs, some from 35 mm, and some from monstrous 8-by-10 negatives. The main subjects are two weirdly related environments: the Sausalito rebel houseboat scene of the 1970s, and the post-Katrina wreckage of St. Bernard’s Parrish in New Orleans (“‘The federal flood’ as my friends there call it,” says Daniel). And yes, the sailvan will make an appearance.

An opening for “Sunset Scavenger” starts at 7 p.m. at RayKo Photo Center, 428 Third St. (at Harrison), S.F. Admission is free; call 495-3773 or visit www.billdaniel.net.

–Hiya Swanhuyser for SFWeekly.com

Art Business: Remembering Our Grand Reopening

“Rayko Photo Center reopens with a palpable shindig after a more than four-year hiatus. Every moocher, crasher, idler, sponger, and freeloader in town was on it like maggots on carrion, cramming their faces with hooch and fodder as fast as they could shovel it down their gullets. Do you black holes of take ever think about giving back? (Sorry. I see them constantly, and it’s vent time.) Fortunately, they were well outnumbered by positives.

Speaking of positives, Rayko is for photographers and digital artists who, for whatever reason, occasionally need to borrow stuff. Rayko rents darkrooms, digital labs, printers, work stations, lighting studios, and more, usually by the hour. Rayko is also currently reviewing portfolios for their new gallery, Photographer’s Marketplace. Check it out, photographic artists. “

–ArtBusiness.com