In anticipation of our upcoming exhibition Cell Signals, today's Online Discovery series highlights SF Camerawork's history of showcasing work that deals with important and often difficult social issues of our time.
"Cultural Contexts: The Work of Ruth Morgan and Jim Goldberg," was published in SF Camerawork's 1985 Summer Quarterly. This article, written by the late Jean McMann, highlights Ruth Morgan's important early work inside San Quentin State Prison and the connection between her photographic project and Jim Goldberg's contemporaneous series Rich and Poor.
We'd also like to share a more recent interview between Ruth Morgan and Cell Signals curator Pete Brook. In their conversation, the two discuss a variety of topics including Morgan's experience photographing on San Quentin's Death Row, her project's impact in both the arts and social justice communities, and her role at Community Works, a restorative justice organization bringing arts programming into Bay Area jails.
Decades after Morgan's important work, the prison industrial complex in the U.S. persists, and a new generation of photographers continue to raise social awareness. SF Camerawork's exhibition Cell Signals will open online on April 23rd featuring the work of Adam Chin, Jodi Darby, Robert Gumpert, Eddie Herena, Wray Herbert-King, Brandon Tauszik, Pendarvis Harshaw, and the Free Mind Collective. These artists employ variant approaches to their subjects including participatory exchange, GIFs, anti-documentary, and modified AI machine-learning, each highlighting issues of power and access that continue today.
1985 Summer SF Camerawork Quarterly
Image courtesy of Eddie Herena
Click here to find our full exhibition history listed by year, as well as videos and digitized print collateral, dating back to SF Camerawork's founding in 1974.
