Category: visual

First Thurs­days at 49 Geary can be over­whelm­ing, peo­ple-wise, and under­whelm­ing, art-wise, and this month was dif­fer­ent only in that the over­whelm­ing­ness was crammed into one place: the Fraenkel Gallery. Packed with peo­ple, it also dis­played a face-melt­ing col­lec­tion of Richard Mis­rach photos.

When I first saw Misrach's pho­tos, I thought imme­di­ate­ly of Sebas­tiao Sal­ga­do. Both guys address big themes — civ­i­liza­tions, sea­sons, land­scapes, human endeav­ors — but they do so in vast­ly dif­fer­ent ways. Sal­ga­do frames his work around human action; his sub­jects are migrants, activi­tists, labor­ers. Mis­rach works with earth, light, space; he works with dunes, strangers, cars, pow­er plants. Salgado's work is tied to cur­rent events, polit­i­cal move­ments, regimes, defin­able moments and rec­og­niz­able things; Mis­rach works with more anony­mous objects and land­scapes. There are much more sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between them, but they share a social aware­ness that invests the best of their work with real intrigue and importance.

Last night we checked out the Oak­land Art Mur­mur. Actu­al­ly, we didn't even know that such a thing exist­ed, and drove over the Bridge intend­ing to see Jason Munn's open­ing at Bloom Screen Print­ing. So it was a pleas­ant sur­prise to see that lit­tle stretch of Tele­graph goin off when we got there. Jason's stuff was the best of the art stuff, by far, but the action on the street was out front of Rock Paper Scis­sors.That's where we saw a guy burn an Amer­i­can flag. It took him rough­ly 10 min­utes of false starts to light it with a Bic, but just after I took this pic­ture, an ambu­lance raced up the street, sirens blar­ing, on its way to some emer­gency, but it abrupt­ly slowed down when the dri­ver saw the burn­ing flag, and we could see the faces of the oth­er para­medics star­ing at the guy as they crawled by. It was one of those only-in-Oak­land moments. Holla!