The notes from my trip to SF Camerawork last Saturday begin like this: “I’m into the Tom Petty that the desk staff is playing, but not so into Jim Stone.” Stone is one of two James D. Phelan Award winners given to California-born photographers in recognition of artistic achievement. I’m hoping I don’t have to explain Tom Petty.
According to the exhibition text, Stone’s oversize portraits of individual Walmart greeters and restaurant owners are meant to elucidate “facets of America’s unusual and complex character,” and showcase themes of “damage, misdirection, isolation and failure.” In reality, they come across as mediocre genre works that do little to flag the attention of your post-John Waters narrator.

Cue Gainsbourg’s Bonnie and Clyde and cut to the panoramic photographs of Doris Jew Conrath, another Phelan award winner. Conrath has a penchant for photographing the orphan children of strip mall development: espresso drive-throughs and their ilk. At first glance the images are as easy to walk by as their real-world counterparts, until you realize that Conrath has photographed the buildings from a variety of perspectives (front, back, side, etc) and then restitched the images. In the process she subverts your sense of comfort, creating buildings that appear real despite their impossible lighting scenarios and strangely mirrored figures.

The second exhibit, Leaving a Mark, get its title from the new issue of Cutter Photozine, a local publication whose aesthetic brings to mind the label protopunk, although that may be because at this point the soundtrack had switched to the Velvet Underground. Cutter features black and white, documentary photographs culled from an open submissions process, and while the individual artistic voices tend to bleed together, the editors use this to their full advantage, creating what amounts to a coherent and energetic artist’s book. In this issue, the marks are physical and psychological, silly and serious: everything from scars and shadows to tattoos and glued-on moustaches