Evgenia Arbugaeva

We think like the photojournalist (natch): Shoot absolutely everything interesting, from every angle and setting, and from the bigger set you're sure to get a handful of good shots and one that just nails it, the image that wows people and could speak for the whole shoot. Now imagine this on a grand scale -- say, 500 photographers from around the world submitting work to a group of professionals. From those, the top 50 photographers are chosen, and from each a single representative image. Say hello to "Contents: Love, Anxiety, Happiness, and Everything Else," which begins tonight (Thursday), at Rakyo Photo Center, home of an old-timey photo booth and unforgettable openings.

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Owen Smith

Building the Iron Horse

On May 27, the Golden Gate Bridge turns 75. If you were one of the 300,000 who walked across the bridge when it turned 50, you remember the unsettling sway, and the later reports that the convex profile of the bridge had been flattened by our collective weight. And you remember that it didn't matter. Euphoria was high. Dianne Feinstein (who was mayor at the time) tossed the $800 Fedora of Willie Brown (who was speaker of the Assembly) into the sea like a Frisbee. Half a million people pushed together on the waterfront to see the bridge turned into a golden waterfall; even with advances in pyrotechnics, few fireworks displays have been as lovely. Why? Because the bridge is gorgeous.

That's the only reason an art exhibit titled "Artistic Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge" could be anything but cheesy crafts-fair death. That is the title of the exhibit at George Krevsky Gallery -- the show opened just this week and is one of 75 tributes to the bridge -- and it's in good hands. (Remember this is the same gallery that brought us "The Art of Baseball," which was far more than just a rah-rah for the hometown nine.)

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Can you envision a "live magazine?" How about an event that combines the best parts of your favorite magazine, like great writing, unusual and illuminating topics, and beautiful, challenging images, with the spontaneity, ephemerality, and added sensory elements such as live music? Pop-Up Magazine is that event, and in its short existence (it has produced six issues in three years) it has become one of the city's most exciting cultural happenings. Tickets to the production sell out in minutes, and presenting at the event has become something like appearing on Saturday Night Live for intellectuals, a high-profile career touchstone earned on stage. Photography and recording is prohibited, so we give you what we can with images from a party associated with the event.More >>

Eadweard Muybridge

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Curator Jamie O'Keefe was conducting a standard inventory check at the San Francisco Fire Department Museum when she noticed tiny lettering in the corner of a photograph: Muybridge Studio.

O'Keefe was floored. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was best known for his pioneering work in motion photography. (Read a review of his 2011 exhibit at SFMOMA, "Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.") The photographer was known for using 12 to 24 cameras at a time and his own shutter in an attempt to create images of suspended motion, resulting in a visual illusion of movement. He has been the focus of major exhibitions worldwide, most notably at the Tate Britain, the Smithsonian, and the Bay Area's own Cantor Center at Stanford University.

What's left of his portfolio is sought after by serious collectors and pre-eminent institutions across the globe -- and the images don't come cheap. Artnet estimates that Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion plates sold, at auction in 2009, for a $45,000.

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Ken Yeung

Jolie O'Dell is one of my favorite San Francisco writers. In the brief time we've known each other, we have eaten lunch at a strip club, gone trampolining at the House of Air, and played charades at the Palace Hotel after Brian Wilson beat us both in the SF Weekly Web Awards for "Best Twitter Personality." By day she's a whipsmart tech journalist, formerly of Mashable, and now of VentureBeat. By night, you can find her waxing domestic at her kick-ass blog, The Single Housewife. O'Dell recently published her first book, Android Photography: A Guide to Mobile Creativity, which teaches you how to create, edit, and share pics with the Android's in-phone camera. Filled with practical tips, app low-downs, and lots of gorgeous photos to inspire, I want to buy this book and I don't even own an Android phone. O'Dell and I talked about her book, whether lesbian hook-up apps are a pipe dream, and Feminism 101.

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Patrick Clifton

No More Words, We Want Action

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Patrick Clifton now spends his days teaching high school in the East Bay, but his Facebook page serves as a retrospective of his former life as an activist photographer. From 1986 to 1991, Clifton focused his camera lens on his San Francisco community, capturing militant AIDS activism through the medium of black-and-white film.

Gerard Koskovich, a curator at the GLBT Historical Society, met the photographer during the high-queer era of the mid-1980s, when the newly discovered human immunodeficiency virus had already infected a large percentage of the city's queer men.

There was no treatment, and the federal government responded at a glacial pace. Homophobic politicians and alarmists in the public sphere attempted to dominate the discourse, using the epidemic to spread hate and fear while the death toll steadily mounted.

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Nacho López

Constructores de ataúdes, Calle Nonoalco, Ciudad de México (Coffin Manufacturers, Nonoalco Street, Mexico City), 1959

Politics runs through "Photography in Mexico." The exhibit, at SFMOMA through July 8, includes shots taken in the 1920s following the Mexican Revolution, ones documenting social injustice, and those of the border region between the United States and Mexico.

The photos of Tina Modotti and Edward Weston open the show. These include Workers Parade (Modotti) and Pirámide del Sol, Teotihuacán (Weston). The photographers went to Mexico City in 1923, and while there were studios on every corner, photography was not considered an art form, says Jessica McDonald, the curator of this show. Modetti and Weston held exhibitions and encouraged photographers that art photography was a viable path. One person they encouraged was Manuel Álvarez Bravo, later one the most influential photographers in Mexico.

Bravo, whose iconic photos include a striking worker, shot, lying in a pool of blood,
was struggling to document the events in his country and find an identity, McDonald says.

"Post-revolution, people were trying to find the essence of Mexicanness," she says. "They were trying to think about Mexican identity after centuries of colonial oppression."

The cultural, social and intellectual movements going on in Mexico interested artists in other parts of the world, McDonald says. For instance, the leader of the Surrealist movement, Frenchman André Breton, a friend of Bravo's, visited Mexico City and later said that in Mexico, Surrealism -- considered by Breton to be a philosophy for living rather than just an artistic movement -- was a part of everyday life.

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Courtney Trouble

I met Courtney Trouble in Las Vegas during the Adult Video News Awards. She was on a sex-positive panel discussing a number of queer-porn related topics. I knew she was up for some awards and I was curious about this young pornographer. Courtney Trouble runs QueerPornTV.com, a small company that is making some big noise. I began to follow her after the AVNs and discovered that one of her films won at a kinky film festival called Cinekink in New York. This is no small feat so I wanted to know where all this began for Trouble.

Trouble does not have the body type usually associated with porn. She is a bigger girl and proud to display all of it on film. Body image is a huge issue in this country. Women are continually given images of what the perfect woman should look like: Barbie dolls, fashion models and pin-up girls. You must be tall, thin, blond and have big boobs. If you deviate from this image, then you are inferior as a female. This is how women are made to feel with the images we are given, and it is problematic in our society. Young women have it hard enough without having to try to live up to what people consider attractive. Trouble decided to make a site where women of all sizes and colors were given a platform.

Trouble started making porn 10 years ago when she was 19. At that time her main source of income was being a phone-sex worker, helping people explore their fantasies. Fantasy fulfillment is an interesting profession and the more you play with it, the more your own desires start to poke through. After a while she began to wonder what her fantasies would look like in pornographic form.

"I wanted to be a porn star so bad I started my own site with the images that I was taking, and very soon afterward, the pictures I was taking of my friends became erotic porn images. I wasn't intending to start a company," Trouble said.

Trouble submitted pictures of herself at one porn website but then realized a girl of her size probably didn't have a good chance of being chosen. So she started her own website, nofauxx.com, and a queer porn company was born.

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Bob Holmgren

Dragon

Most of our smartphones contain digital cameras that rival the best that money could buy less than a decade ago. We often pay hundreds of dollars for these devices. And what do we do with them? Filter our 8-megapixel masterpieces through apps such as Hipstamatic and Instagram, to lend that elusive "shitty camera" sheen of yesteryear's cheap point-and-click models. It makes a persuasive case for Devo's grand theory of devolution -- as a race, we're going backward. But whether the trend toward faux-distressed photos with blown-out colors is mindless fun or the worst kind of kitsch, the results definitely lack the authentic charm of photos taken with a real, bottom-shelf, analog camera. Said cameras are becoming harder to find, but RayKo gallery director Ann Jastrab must have a secret stash, which she dispatched for "the International Juried Plastic Camera Show," which opens tonight (Wednesday). Jastrab describes the show as an exhibition of "the best images from the worst cameras."

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On a recent Saturday, art enthusiasts went to SOMArts looking to expand their collection and left with a little bit of good karma. Visual Aid auctioned off walls full of works from local artists, including paintings, photographs, and even pillows. It was all part of Big Deal, the nonprofit's 18th annual charity art auction benefiting artists living with AIDS and other life-threatening illnesses. Each year, Big Deal consists of a silent auction, a live auction, and a numerical system where interested buyers wait their turn to choose one of the various pieces all at a fixed price of $165. We snuck in to Big Deal this year and got a glimpse at all the great work on display. Here are some of our favorites (for more photos of the event, check out my personal blog).

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