Our annual “Get The Hell Out Of The Rain” trip is off to a great start. We have spent our first week in the Bay Area visiting family and friends and seeing as many great photos as possible. Our exploration began at the Oakland Museum of California with a great Richard Misrach show, “1991: Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath”. Immediately after the fire Misrach roamed the devastated neighborhoods with an 8 x 10 camera recording what many have called one of the worst urban disasters in American history. Out of respect for the victims, the artist had kept the images in storage for 20 years.

Next up was the SFMOMA for the much celebrated Francesca Woodman Show. This is the first major American retrospective of the artist’s work since her tragic suicide in 1981 at the age of 22. In Francesca Woodman’s terribly short life she managed to compile a huge body of highly influencial and ground breaking photographic art, over 10,000 negatives and 800 prints.

We finished up at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco with the Robert Adams’ “Consolations: Prairie, Forest, Sea” show. Astoria’s own, Robert Adams has had a huge influence on generations of artists. His refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West of the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space.

“no place is boring, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.” -robert adams