Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Pier 24 in San Francisco



This afternoon I visited an amazing photography collection in an amazing gallery. Pier 24 is located almost directly underneath the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. It's the creation of money manager Andy Pilara and the Pilara Family Foundation. Although Pilara's photographic holdings are on the scale of what you'd expect of a substantial museum, the gallery was showing a portion of another large collection, that of San Franciscan's Bob and Randi Fisher. The Fisher's collection has substantial holdings in American photographers (though not exclusively) who defined the medium during the 1960s to 1980s. It features Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, William Eggleston and many others.



Visiting Pier 24 requires you to register in advance--my reservation was about two weeks in advance. Reservations allow two hours of viewing among a small group visitors and it's free. The space devoted to showing work is vast without being crowded. For anyone serious about the art of photography this is a stop you should not miss.