Harvey Milk Photo Center Photo Book Open Call

The Harvey Milk Photo Center is developing a collection of photobooks from Bay Area artists within the David Johnson Reference Library and invites artists and publishers from the Bay Area to submit their books for consideration.

The selected books will be displayed in the David Johnson Reference Library at the Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco. In addition, the books will be featured on our social media and will go into the permanent collection at the Center. Five books will be selected per cycle and will be judged by a committee from the Center.

You can see selected books from previous years below.

Submissions for the 2026 round has closed — learn more and apply here

Photo Book Selections 2026

My photographic work grows out of sustained engagement with communities and landscapes undergoing periods of social, economic, or environmental change. Working primarily with large format film, I am interested in the ways people inhabit places shaped by forces beyond their control, and in making photographs that complicate familiar narratives about those places.

Going South – Big Sur began in the winter of 2017, when extreme rainfall following years of drought and wildfire caused the collapse of the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge and the largest landslide in Big Sur’s recorded history. Highway 1 was severed to both the north and south, isolating the community for more than a year. During this period, I hiked a large format camera into Big Sur and began photographing the unusually quiet landscape and the people who remained there.

I was not interested in making another conventionally beautiful book about Big Sur. Instead, I wanted to look beneath its familiar postcard image and portray a place marked simultaneously by beauty, destruction, isolation, resilience, and continued daily life. The book combines landscapes, interiors, evidence of the damaged environment, and portraits of residents who continued to live, work, and make art while the region was cut off.

Going South – Big Sur was published by Schilt Publishing in 2019. The hardcover book contains 80 pages and 44 full color photographs. It measures approximately 11.8 × 12.4 inches, or 30 × 31.5 centimeters, and is offset printed on paper with a case bound hardcover.

www.kirkcrippens.com @kirkcrippens

Artist Statement: My work centers on the physicality of image-making and the ethics of representation through large-format wet plate collodion photography. Using a 19th-century process in contemporary environments, I create one-of-a-kind photographic plates that emphasize slowness, materiality, and embodied image-making in contrast to the speed of digital image culture. I am particularly interested in documenting subcultures and strength-centered communities that are often underrepresented, with an emphasis on collaboration, consent, and material presence. Through projects such as Jamnesia, I produce archival objects that honor labor, embodiment, and community.

Book Description:

JAMNESIA is a self-published limited edition fine art photography monograph documenting the roller derby community through wet plate collodion photography. The book combines portraits, documentary images, and 2 personal essays to explore identity, resilience, and belonging within a sport built on self-expression and mutual support.

Pages: 182

Photographs: Approximately 160 photographs

Dimensions: 10.25 × 12.5 inches (portrait)

Materials: Hardcover, printed on premium matte art paper with full-color offset printing and black paper with metallic silver ink in negative. The publication was released in a limited first edition of 1,000 copies.

www.nitratefox.com @nitrate_fox

“Down There” is a documentary photography project examining the hidden networks of lesbian communities across Mississippi, the most religious state in the U.S. Amid strict religious values and anti-LGBTQ+ laws, lesbians in Mississippi fight an unseen revolution by growing love and liberation in a hostile environment that prays for their extinction. In response to social ostracism and eroding protections, these communities sustain love, joy, and community through land stewardship, independent publishing, and the creation of alternative spiritual and cultural spaces. Simply existing and choosing not to leave becomes a form of resistance against beloved traditional values and institutional hatred.

Utilizing the Gender Studies program at both major Mississippi Universities, the grassroots newsletter Lesbian Connection, and queer-focused organizations like The Spectrum Center and Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition, I embedded with different communities around the state for five weeks to provide diverse examples of experiences and infrastructure by region. Through an intimate, long-form visual approach shot primarily on 35mm film, “Down There” documents the quiet intimacy within homes and the precarious, omnipresent balance between accepting oneself and treading carefully in public spaces. My photographs are combined with handwritten notes so the women can speak for themselves and shape their own legacy while challenging dominant stereotypes of Mississippi and queer life. Lesbians in Mississippi create the care and support for each other that is largely unprovided to them by families, schools, or laws. Still, their lives, and this project, continue to center on love and connection rather than hardship.

The book is an 8×10 hardbound, 57-page series that includes 50 photographs, 5 letters, and introductory polaroids.

@sophiabcutino , https://www.sophiacutino.com

Artist Statement

I am a visual artist working in photography, artist books, sculpture, and mixed media, often using archival materials. I explore how private memory and personal stories meet official history. I was born in the USSR and lived most of my life in Russia, then moved to Armenia, then to the UAE. Since 2023, I have been based in Santa Clara. I believe that knowledge of the past can make a person stronger today, and that digesting and rearranging even hard experiences can build a strong foundation for a sustainable future.

My artistic practice is my way of getting to know the place I live in better, of meeting the people who live here and listening to their stories. To me, the photobook is the best format for visual storytelling, and one of the best ways to learn more about the world we live in through the stories of real people.

About BINOM photo book

BINOM examines how a family story intertwines with a larger historical narrative, and how the exploration of a family history and its photographic archive can be a key to understanding the contradictions of Soviet and Russian identity.

For most of my life I believed I knew my father. He died by suicide in 2001, and the box he left behind- photographs, slides, family albums, official documents, personal belongings – revealed a life I had never been told about. For more than twenty-five years he had worked as a KGB cryptographer, developing encryption algorithms to secure government communications. His work was classified so tightly that his own family never knew its true scope.

BINOM is built from that archive and structured as two interconnected volumes. One holds the father a daughter remembers: a summer house built by hand, evenings spent writing code, childhood games, family rituals. The other traces the secret life that opens slowly from the documents – a life built on silence and carefully guarded truths.

It is about the impartiality of mathematics, which serves the brilliant inventor and the secret service of a dictatorship with equal fidelity. It is about double lives and the destructive power of secrecy built on a great lie. It is about propaganda and learned blindness – the very particular ability of Soviet people to fold opposite things and events into a single normalized picture of life, detached from politics. The title comes from mathematics: a binomial is an expression of two terms. Students of the KGB’s cryptography faculty also jokingly called themselves binomes.

Awards:

2025 – Winner, 11th LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award

2024 – shortlisted in APhF Dummy Award feat. Witty Books

2023 – shortlisted in Photobook Award EI

Editions:

2025 – self-published as a hand-bound edition of 92 hand-numbered, signed copies

2026 – edition of 1000 copies, published by BLOW UP PRESS (Warsaw) and Les Rencontres d’Arles. ISBN 978-83-977057-4-6

Pages: 192

Photographs and drawings: 152

Dimensions: 16.5 × 22 cm

Language: English and French

www.drachinskaya.com @drachinskaya

Statement: After is an artist book rooted in my lifelong relationship to the Delaware River and northeastern Pennsylvania. My connection to this landscape is part of my personal history, the subject of long-term artistic engagement, and the fracture of environmental changes I have witnessed.

In 2023, one of my closest friends passed away suddenly. Our friendship is deeply connected to the place where we grew up, where we hiked, camped, and rafted together. After college, we moved back home, and I photographed the landscape along the Delaware River while he stood nearby fishing. I returned to these photographs in the wake of his death. The land carries what I cannot.

Printing photographs by hand became a way of processing my grief. This led me to create new images in response, picturing a landscape shaped by time and absence. These new images are different, as the landscape has changed significantly since then, the Delaware River Valley itself is changing. Historically, I have exhibited my work as large-format silver gelatin prints. For this project, I wanted the viewing experience to feel more intimate.

I created cyanotype prints housed in window mats and bound into an accordion style book. The tactile labor of making these books by hand extended my connection to both my friend and the landscape. As an artist book, After can be held or exhibited extended on a table, mimicking the flow of the river the images capture. Moving through the work traces how the landscape carries both the time we shared and what came after. Our friendship continues through our shared relationship to this place and the landscape we loved so dearly.

Description: 22-page, 8½ × 9½-inch (closed) handmade artist book featuring 10 cyanotype photographs printed on Strathmore Printmaking paper. Interior text pages are also cyanotype printed on Strathmore Mixed Media paper. Accordion-bound. Edition of 10.

www.christinehuhn.com, IG: @chrissyhuhn, chrissyhuhn@gmail.com

Photo Book Selections 2025

www.JaneIvory.com @JaneIvoryPhotographer

Inundation/A Lament The images included in this series were captured along California’s Humboldt County coast. This is not only one of the most active earthquake locations on Earth with colliding tectonic plates right off shore, but also where land and sea are often at the same level. Local tectonic movements cause the onshore land here to sink making it even more susceptible to the inevitable – climate change caused rising sea. Already tsunami warning signs are omnipresent as you drive north from farm land south of Eureka to Orick and beyond. The Arcata water storage tanks will have to be moved inland. The waste water ponds created to filter used water before it flows out to sea will be inundated. The already soggy grazing pastures will be overwhelmed with sea water. The fishing and logging industries which have long supported Humboldt County will be devastated. The Orick pasture in front of the old school house favored by herds of elk will be under water as will the extraordinarily beautiful Trinidad and Moonstone beaches. More often than not, I’m drawn to places that have an ecological story to tell – places where there’s a sense of urgency to not only address climate change, but for me, as a photographer, to capture the idiosyncratic character of the land before what once was is gone or horribly transformed. That is the case here. This series of images is my lament, my love song to this incredibly beautiful stretch of the Northern California coast. Limited edition of 100. All books signed and numbered. Hard covered, flush cut 12×9.25”. Lay flat binding so images that cross over center gutter read well. 49 of my photographs of Humboldt County coastal area which will be devastated by climate change caused sea rise. 88 pages. Poem by Jerry Martien. Book design by Bob Ciano.

www.charlottamh.com @charlottamh

“A Sense of Place – Imprints of Iceland” features landscape works from 2003-2019. The work ranges from diptychs and triptychs to human scale composite images as well as hand cut layered prints in fingerprint and landform patterns. The book is 96 pages with 45 photographs. Published by Daylight Books, in 2020, 10x1x10in. I was inspired to photograph the Icelandic landscape after I moved to the United States and realized how closely my homeland was connected to my identity and sense of being. Landscapes are infused with personal history, as both physical spaces and the contexts for our memories. My first project, “Dreamscapes,” aimed to visually represent the feeling of passing through the land, with fragmented and blurred images emphasizing the imperfections of memory and the mind’s inability to retain and fully comprehend its environment. The “Scapes” series stems from a desire to hold onto a place, to create a scene that grounds me. In each location I capture the environment from various perspectives and then compose these individual photographs into large-scale, vertical triptychs that present an alternate vision of the space. While the landscape appears cohesive from a distance, a closer look reveals the seams between the photos—a reminder that no experience can ever be perfectly preserved. Over these years photographing the landscape in Iceland I’ve witnessed firsthand the effects of climate change, which inspired the “Imprints” series. The hand made three-dimensional pieces are cut and layered using topographical and fingerprint patterns. Still exploring the deep bond we have to nature, this work also questions our responsibility for the marks we leave behind.

www.dekwok.com @de_kwok

Codependency is San Francisco-based photographer De Kwok’s new book that is a culmination of four years of work traveling the world from Iceland to New York to Los Angeles and beyond. The work is a colorful obsession with contemporary portraiture and walking by startling beauty — all through a queer Asian American lens. All but a handful of the photos were shot on 35mm color film. 7×10 Softcover, perfect bound 152 full-color pages Suggested retail $60 (USD); wholesale $30 Printed in Richmond, CA, USA   De Kwok has published multiple photobooks. His most recent, Lust to Love was short-listed at the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, Month of Los Angeles show. Lust to Love, was featured on Self Publish, Be Happy; Queer Quarterly and Photobookshow. His current photobook, Codependency, has been selected for inclusion in the Filter Photo Festival’s On The Shelf exhibition by Tim Carpenter.

marytfaria.com @marytfaria1223

“Lingering at your window,” Datz Press, Seoul, Korea.  For decades I have been drawn to making photographs that convey a tension between what is seen and what lies beyond. In the liminal space of shadows and in the dim light just before dawn or in its first rays calling cherished surroundings into a heightened presence, I find a visual vocabulary for things perceived but not grasped. In my book, Lingering at your window, Datz Press has brought together varied elements of my photographic work organized around the experience of being “in-between” and in transition. The book combines a spectrum of film-based, digital and cyanotype images from across years of my photographic practice where boundaries between known and unknown are blurred, combined with excerpts of my writing made during a period of caring for my parents in the final stages of their lives. My approach to making images has helped to guide me, connecting past to present, honoring loss and mystery and encouraging the relationship between uncertainty and possibility. 

Submissions open July 12 – August 12, 2025
Notifications will go out September 8, 2025

Please submit the following below:

1. Your artist statement and a short description of the book including number of pages, approximate number of photos, dimensions, and materials
2. Six to ten images of your book
3. An up to date CV
4. Your website and social media handles

2025 Submission Form

The Harvey Milk Photo Center houses a collection of photobooks from Bay Area artists within the David Johnson Reference Library and invites artists and publishers from the Bay Area to submit their books for consideration.

The selected books are currently displayed in the David Johnson Reference Library at the Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco. In addition, the books will be featured on our social media and will go into the permanent collection at the Center. Five books will be selected per cycle and will be judged by a committee from the Center.

Photo Book Selections 2024

About the Artist: Jeanne bought her first camera at ten with money earned from picking strawberries in Skagit Valley, Washington where she was born and raised. Trained for one year at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara she then transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute and in 1982 received a BFA in Photography. During the 1980’s she lived and worked in the Bay Area, contributed to the social and political movements of the day through her photography with work published in local magazines and neighborhood newspapers. Her more personal projects were exhibited in alternative galleries. They illustrated her mission to push against boundaries, explore the counterculture and express her own vision. In 1990 she returned to Skagit Valley, where as a single mother she raised her son. Through her photography, she explored her intimate relation to rural farm life, the surrounding environment, and the people who lived and worked there. She exhibited her work in galleries, museums, public spaces, and in private collections. She also contributed to the book and exhibition Harvesting the Light, which advocates for preservation of farmland in Skagit. During this time she worked at a photo lab in Bellingham, Washington and the Whatcom Museum of History and Art specializing in black and white printing. In 2013 she returned to San Francisco working on a multi-media project about the alternative art, music, and political scene during the punk heyday of the 1980’s.

About the book: When I moved to San Francisco in 1980 to continue with my education in photography, I immediately dove into the DIY scene that was happening all around me with my camera in hand. Photography was my way to connect and contribute, while I explored the intertwined communities of art, music and activism. You could say I took a walk on the Wild Side San Francisco’s extraordinary beauty and power. My 126 page book Alternative Voices offers 102 photographs and 16 interviews conducted by Jonah Raskin. Together they document the charged cultural and political scene of the underground that made S.F. a fertile center for poetry, art, Punk & New Wave music, performance and protest, all on the cusp of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The images, viewed through the lens of a young woman were informed by DIY Punk energy. They represent a unique time and place of inexpensive Mission District flats, old storefronts, dark basements and abandoned warehouses that were turned into art and music spaces where participants were free to roam and create. From all over the USA, we came together to cross social boundaries and express our discontent of Reagan’s America.

Artist’s Website: www.jeannemhansen.com
Your Instagram handle: @jeannehansen5

About the Artist: I am a photographer living in Oakland, California. I use an analog camera and shoot almost exclusively in black and white film. I am very interested in the entire process of making an image, from seeing a scene to printing it in the darkroom. I believe that photography has the ability to share stories that can inspire and make people feel like they are not alone. In the past 5 years, I have directed my photography toward my own life, making projects about my experiences, making art my savior.

About the book: Insufficient rendering occurs when there is an absence of emulsion coating on the film. When this happens, the image isn’t complete in print. I use Insufficient Rendering as a metaphor for my brother’s life. In 2007, my brother died. It was unexpected and devastating. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and he was in California. He was young, and his life was rendered incomplete. I have flown back to Manhattan many times to take photographs of where I was standing when I got the phone call that day, searching for a way to express how it all felt. The images and words in this book are the closest I have come. This 20-page book is 4 inches x 5 inches in size and holds 11 photographs. I printed the photographs in a polaroid style for nostalgia’s sake, to evoke memory of the past. I used a typewriter to type onto Vellum and then glued the captions onto the pages. The dust cover is held to the text block by magnets at the flaps on the front and back. This design allows the viewer to remove the cover to display the accordion nature of the book, placing the scene, and therefore my journey, before the viewer in its entirety. This book was handmade, and all the photographs were printed in my darkroom. This is a first printing, limited edition.

Artist’s Website: www.deanacollins.com

About the Artist: As the daughter of a psychologist, I’m deeply curious about the human condition. In life and in art, I strive to connect, to understand, to find common ground. My images are uniquely personal; I’m drawn to intimacy, intensity, authenticity. Having experienced losses early in life, I gravitate toward themes of longing and solitude but always with hints of hope and rebirth not far away.  I am interested in themes around female representation and how they have evolved over time. Through my art, I both ask and consider answers to complex questions. With camera in hand, I engage with the world, ever present, and eager to capture the moments that give us all pause to reflect. I’m a storyteller. And with my lifelong love for the moving image, I often create photographs with a cinematic flare.

About the book:  “Early grief is a liminal time.” Megan Devine Shortly after he died, I bought a red purse. I knew I needed it, but I didn’t know why. For years the purse sat on my dresser, waiting for me to take up its call. The Red Purse tells a story of transition, of rebuilding. The project grew from a journey, my journey, of navigating through—and beyond– the darkness and uncertainty of young widowhood.

After my husband passed, I was overcome with grief, with fear, with sadness, but other emotions, confusing, even shameful emotions, soon struck: a rush of femininity, a burst of sexuality, an unexpected excitement. Alone with two young children, I struggled to absorb and understand these disparate, and, at times, unsettling feelings. He had been ill for a long time, and I craved for a sense of normalcy, a sense of wholeness. I wanted what I had lost. I had trouble thinking of myself as a widow, unwilling, at first, to join that club. I did not want to raise my boys under a shroud of loss. I did not want people to pity me. I slowly, cautiously, stepped outside of my grief. Rejoining the world did not come easy. When I had fun, guilt ate away at me; when things did not go well, shame prevailed. I alternated between ups and downs, exhilaration, and embarrassment. Confusion reigned, for years. Gradually, I became bolder; I dared to experiment, trying out new roles, new personalities, new styles. I flirted; I dated; I risked. I felt, almost, like an actress in my own movie, sometimes a film noir—full of danger, drama, and suspense. The red purse stood as a daily reminder: despite the enormity of the tasks at hand, I needed to make room for femininity, for frivolity, for spontaneity. It gave me permission to experiment with who I would become, both real and imagined.

The Red Purse project is, in the end, not a tale of grief, but rather a toast to life, to redefining, to flourishing. The Red Purse, a fictionalized account of my story, is meant to inspire, to prompt conversation, to pay tribute to those who have lost, to those who have struggled, and to those who have evolved. 

Artist’s Website: www.jacquerupp.com
Your Instagram handle: @jacquerupp

About the Artist: I use photography as a way to see more deeply into the world for the purpose of making personal and intimate connections with people. I am drawn towards illuminating communities that are vulnerable because when people struggle with oppression, they are often rendered invisible. Seeing and witnessing are a form of justice, and a means of acknowledging the stories and lives of others. I am also interested in how we belong in the world, collectively and individually, and how we locate and interpret our belonging despite the impacts of default circumstances and conditioning, either by societal (cultural and political) or intergenerational (familial/ancestral) influences. As a social documentary photographer, my work is centered on seeing others and their circumstances with deeper than ordinary eyes, in service to the wholeness and truth of our individual and collective human experience, particularly at a time when there is so much divisiveness in the world. 

About the book: “Occupied” is a photographic depiction of Palestinian life under the Israeli Occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank) through my eyes as an American social documentary photographer, while my daughter was living and working there for six years. My images reflect five separate visits with Palestinians living in refugee camps, working on their farmlands during olive planting and picking seasons, existing within daily life on the streets of Bethlehem, and at checkpoint crossings between the Separation Wall and Jerusalem. I was especially drawn to the often-contentious interactions Palestinians experienced with the military or with settlers at the intersection of Palestinian-owned farmland and settlements located on illegally annexed Palestinian land. In view of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip and the escalating violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, this work is particularly relevant today.

Artist’s Website: http://www.irisbritostevens.com
Instagram handle: @iriseyeswideopen

About the Artist: Kevin Flynn is a photographer and visual artist who resides in Oakland, California. He attained the Bachelor of Arts Degree in Photography from the Aesthetic Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

About the book: Of all our senses, we primarily rely on eyesight for perceiving and comprehending the world. As a result, our culture has developed imagery to communicate with each other, distinct from our inherited facial and body cues and evolving later our verbal languages. Unfortunately, our images have moved beyond the point of saturation, creating visual and mental fatigue.

These photographs were created as a respite from over stimulation. They are meant to be viewed unfettered from the intellect and centered for contemplation and meditation.

Artist’s Website: www.kevinflynnphotographer.com

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Photo Book Selections 2023

The Harvey Milk Photo Center is developing a collection of photo books from Bay Area artists within the David Johnson Reference Library. Here are the selections from the 2023 photo book open call.

About the Artist: Mitsu Yoshikawa was born in Japan. He studied photography under Peter Stackpole at Academy of Art College in San Francisco, and moved to New York City where he worked for Yomiuri Newspaper and as a freelance photographer. After several years, he accepted a nine-month assignment taking photographs in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka for airline travel magazines. Following that assignment, he returned to Tokyo, where he continued to work as a freelance photographer and expanded his experience to include photographing, editing and publishing yearbooks. He photographs nature and wilderness scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area with large format cameras and also started using digital photography recently.

About the book: When I look at landscapes closely, I see the myriad details and subjects that, together in the thousands, create the total landscape. Though often ignored, these small pieces, individually, convey strong messages—sometimes with greater intensity than the total. I try to find these strong messages hidden in the details and bring them to the surface, and to the notice of people. Each photograph contains thousands of bits of information, but the photographer has to create messages, through the images selected, to the audience. More importantly, each photographer has to create his or her own messages by choosing the best tools and equipment to capture the right momentum for the subject and message.  Large format cameras are the best for me to use to capture the subjects and convey the messages I want to convey.

Artist’s Website: www.mitsuyoshikawa-image.com

Instagram handle: @mitsu.yoshikawa

About the Artist: Laila Nahar is a lens-based artist in California, USA. She lived her life in stark cultural contrast, born and brought up in Bangladesh and eventually migrated to the US in her late 20’s for pursuing higher studies in Engineering. Laila recently retired from the high-tech industry after 24 years to devote full-time to the passion of her life as a photo and book artist.

Laila is primarily a self-taught photographer exploring belonging, memory, cultural and collective identity. Lately, she has become increasingly fascinated with hand-made photo book making.

Laila had solo exhibitions from the ‘Memories from Bangladesh’ series in Steps Gallery (Arizona) and Nelson Gallery (California). Photographs from this series are in permanent collections of ASU and UCDavis photography Museums.

About the book: Not every experience appears in my mind as a book, some does and for some I become the part of that story that can only be narrated in a book. As I walked the old city of Delhi it was life at its infinite wondrous variation. Each nook and each corner are at its unique existence, yet no one would exist in its glorious beauty without the rest. A story of one linked to another and none losing its identity. It is a spectacle of color, fragrance, sound and above all the depth of life. Nothing is orchestrated, yet all are sung from the invisible strings of a great tune. I get pulled and submerged into its comforting depth.

This is a book that symbolizes the unfolding, folding and linkage of life. A life that is vibrant without the pretense of ornamentation. It is a life of struggle, unadorned, and revealed; and it surrounds us, and it penetrates us. The book-form unfolds and depicts the color of life-waves. The juxtaposition of the photos and colors tries to bring the sense of vitality, and the structural element opens up an entry into a world of people, places and the many activities that make up life.

Artist’s Website: https://www.lailanahar.com/

Instagram handle: @naharlaila

About the Artist: Luis Cobelo Born in 1970 in Acarigua, Venezuela. Artist. 

He grew up and became a photographer between Venezuela and Spain. 

After a long and consolidated career as a photojournalist carrying out documentary projects in the Americas, Asia and Europe, which were published in magazines in Spain, Europe and Latin America, his work is currently based on art and the production of photobooks and exhibitions. 

His focus is on fantasy, magical realism and Latin American popular culture, where he generates stories from his personal perspective, reflecting on the process of transforming the everyday into the unusual, from the tragic to funny and vice versa.

Inspired by literature, popular culture, cinema, poetry, myths and traditions (including lies and gossip) he relies on the use of different types of realities that could well be magic tricks (without being a real magician), to create parallel worlds tailored to his own expectations.

He is based in San Francisco (California)

About the book: “Chas Chas” is a magic word, a magic trip. It’s a personal tribute to the city of Buenos Aires, through a particular and poetic neighborhood called Parque Chas.The project is inspired by an Argentinian comic book series of the same name that Luis Cobelo read 32 years ago. The comic reveals, in several chapters, the adventures of a writer who was told that fantastic and extraordinary things happen there. 

The reason that “out of the ordinary” things can take place is because the center of the neighborhood was architecturally constructed similar to a spider’s web or a labyrinth. So, that’s why they say that if you enter into that concentric form, you may never leave and magical things can happen to you. Many say that this is the reality and not what is out there. Essentially, in Parque Chas everything is possible.

Many years later, Luis decided to travel thousands of kilometers to see it for himself. But what really took him there was the desire to discover if the following saying which he heard about this mythical neighborhood was true: “Everything you ever lost in life, exists in Parque Chas”.

And yes, it does.

“Chas Chas” It reads like a graphic novel or a mystery story, with many layers of internal and external references. The flow of images conjures a smile-inducing dream logic that feels strangely rooted to the alternate reality of street life in this fantastic place.

All of this happens through Cobelo’s hallucinatory playful eyes, who move through the implausible stories a thousand times told that became real, only for those who want to believe. It is a snap, an intangible place where whoever and whatever was lost, will be found. Can be for everyone, except for those who want to know how magic tricks are done.

NOTE: in the exhibitions, this work includes the performance/presence of Pilar, Luis Cobelo’s sister. 

Artist’s Website: www.luiscobelo.com

Instagram handle: @churrito and @chaschasluiscobelo

About the Artist: Jocelyn Lui’s photo practice focuses on documentary-style observations of chill views (or tranquil landscapes) and quiet, overlooked moments. She was introduced to film photography in high school and has been making images in her spare time ever since. Currently, her favorite camera is the Olympus OM-2n.  

About the book: Diptychs is a photo zine that explores image sets of landscapes and portraits made primarily in the Bay Area. In it Lui plays with negative space, horizon lines and alignment to help complete the image sets.

Artist’s Website: https://www.jocelynlui.com

Instagram handle: @jocelyn_lui

About the Artist: Phyllis Christopher’s fearless and tender photographs fuse lesbian sex and queer protest against the backdrop of a city in flux. Relocating to San Francisco from her hometown Buffalo in the late-1980s, Christopher began to collaborate with her subjects to make images in which documentary and performance converge.

About the book: Dark Room brings together fifteen years of Christopher’s work, negotiating street, club, and studio, with camera in hand, to compose a portrait of a community simultaneously defining radical articulations of queer lesbian sexuality and defending its bodily autonomy in the face of right-wing politics, the AIDS crisis and urban gentrification. Reproducing photographs of startling intensity and sensuality alongside new writing by Susie Bright, Laura Guy, Michelle Tea and an interview with Shar Rednour, Dark Room is a heartfelt record of Christopher’s devotion to an analogue tradition, to the pleasures of photographs and the community that made them.

Artist’s Website: https://phyllischristopher.com/ 

Instagram handle: @phyllischristopher

About the Artist: Wanderer, stroller, flâneuse. Photographer Candice J. Jacobus roams the world looking, noticing and making images of people, and the places they inhabit.

An observer of street life, whether in her home of San Francisco or in cities around the world, Candice searches out the byways and markets where locals carry on their public, or not so public, lives. Often, it’s not the individuals, but the doorway they may emerge from, or the corner that they may round that captures her eye. Sometimes a window beckons, what is happening within? Often it is the ghost of a being converging with time past and future in a shop window.  Always there is the sense of a human presence.

About the book: Looked at from a distance of nearly three years, the empty city could be the result of any number of modern disasters, but it was a plague. Images from tourist-mecca San Francisco’s suddenly childless playgrounds, vacant transit hubs, and cable carless streets could speak to a nuclear disaster, but instead they are Postcards from the Pandemic.

Included in the book are also many images of the masked strangers Candice Jacobus encountered in her wanderings: everyday folks with handmade protection against the unknown menace.

Artist’s Website: https://www.candicejacobusphotography.com

Instagram handle: @cjverite