MICHAEL KENNA
TEMPLE TREES, NARA, HONSHU, JAPAN, 2002

Gelatin silver print, printed and sepia toned by artist, special PhotoAlliance edition of 45
7 3/4 x 7 3/4" image on 13" x 10" sheet

Michael Kenna's work has often been described as enigmatic, graceful and hauntingly beautiful much like the Japanese landscape. Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 for a one-person exhibition and was utterly seduced by the country's terrain. Over the years he has traveled throughout almost the entire country constantly taking photographs. From these many treks the book Japan, featuring 95 of these photographs, was conceived. Michael Kenna talked at PhotoAlliance in 2002 and 2009.

JAMES HENKEL
SNOW BOWL, 1997

Archival pigment print
11 x 13-1/2" image on 13 x 15-1/2" sheet

For this series, Henkel places a vessel of water in such a way that the surface reflects the trees and sky above it, while the foreground becomes blurry. In this piece, the bowl is set in snow, rendering a white background to the winter trees reflected on the water’s glassy surface. James Henkel lives in South Carolina, and has work in numerous collections including, SFMOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

MICHAEL LIGHT
TRONA MINE AND GREEN RIVER, 2007

Archival pigment print, edition of 15.
15-1/2” x12-1/2” on 16” x 20” sheet

Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer, bookmaker, and pilot whose focus is the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it. His work is concerned both with the politics of that relationship and the seductions of landscape representation, particularly as found in the arid Western spaces of America. He works with found, appropriated imagery gleaned from public archives and his own 4 x 5" negatives, most often taken from the air, pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, geology, and various aspects of the sublime. Michael Light shared his works at PhotoAlliance in 2007 and 2015.

LAURA MCPHEE
IRRIGATOR'S TARP DIRECTING WATER, 2004

Archival pigment print
11" x 14" image on 14" x 17" sheet

Laura McPhee made these photographs over several years on successive visits to the Sawtooth Valley. River of No Return is organized like a long poem or a piece of music...a stunning look at an actual place, a meditation on rivers, nature, history, the history of landscape photography, of the American West and the idea of the American West—the nature of fact and the nature of myth, and how we hold the world in our hands. Laura McPhee is a PhotoAlliance 2009 lecturer.

BEN NIXON
SWAMP WATER NEAR GEORGETOWN, SC, 2013

Hand toned gelatin silver print from a Collodian negative, edition of 10
11" x 14" sheet

Ben Nixon creates landscapes of extraordinary beauty through the unwieldy nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process, a hands-on photographic technique that offers the artist tight control of materials and yet invites serendipitous visual irregularities influenced by conditions in the field. Nixon avoids photographing recognizable landscapes, transforming non-iconic terrain into mysterious, intriguing worlds. While shooting in the field, Nixon's car becomes the darkroom, because in the collodion process, glass-plate negatives have to be prepared, exposed, and developed on-site while the materials are moist. Ben Nixon is a PhotoAlliance 2010 lecturer.

BIRNEY IMES
HAVANA BLEND PRINT, 1993

Archival pigment print
7-3/4" x 9-3/4" image on 11” x 12-1/2" sheet

Photographer Birney Imes documents the Mississippi Delta, and this series of photographs that he took at a roadhouse called The Whispering Pines shows one of the cigar boxes that the roadhouse owner, Blume Triplett, used to store items. Birney Imes is a PhotoAlliance 2016 lecturer.

LINDA CONNOR
BASALT AND STREAM, ICELAND, 2008

In October, PhotoAlliance was honored to be invited by First Exposures to work together on a joint fundraiser honoring our founder and creative director, artist Linda Connor. This warm evening offered the chance to toast our very own icon of Bay Area photography, as well as bring our two organizations closer together. Linda generously produced a limited edition print for the event, with proceeds equally benefitting both organizations. Just a few remain, If you'd like to extend the impact of your giving this December by supporting PhotoAlliance and FirstExposures in one fell swoop, please contact Ava Morton at First Exposures to inquire about the print details.

PhotoAlliance and First Exposures have over fifty years of combined service to photography education in San Francisco, and we're excited to continue to partner with them in the future!

PhotoAlliance is proud to present the portfolio INSIGHT/INCITE 20/20 as a tribute to our twenty years of service to the Bay Area photography community, and as a foundation for our future!

Curated by PhotoAlliance founder and creative director Linda Connor, this portfolio includes 20 signed limited edition prints by local, regional and international photographers.

Available at introductory pricing of $2,500 this holiday season. Please contact rachel@photoalliance.org