SF Camerawork 35th Anniversary show

At Psychic Reality, in downtown Oakland, customers can pay $20 for a photograph of their aura.

Between 2002 and 2004, photographer Anne Collier brought her friends to the shop to sit for portraits, like the one above—but she wasn’t interested in the pseudoscientific analysis of their chromatic halos. She created the series as a way of asking whether it’s possible to photograph what cannot be seen.

That question reverberates through most of the works by Collier and 30 or so other photographers in The Future Lasts Forever, the second installment of SF Camerawork’s 35th-anniversary exhibition, An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area.

While the first part, which ran through last October, focused on concrete depictions of local places (Catherine Wagner’s documentation of the Moscone Center) and personalities (Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Alice Waters), the sequel is more provocatively spectral.

David Maisel photographed X-rays of artifacts in the Asian Art Museum to reveal archival records that upstage the original antiquities, and Tammy Rae Carland, inspired by old masters like Dorothea Lange, sought to reimagine her own history by restaging snapshots she has of her parents.The works in this show are the product of more than just lenses and mirrors—they are the self-penned story of a region that has always looked deeper. 

Jan 7–Apr 17, SF Camerwork, 657 Mission St., 2nd Fl., S.F., 415-512-2020, SFCamerawork.org