The Fight to Save SF Camerawork

When SF Camerawork announced its imminent closure in mid August, the news was read by some as just another hard luck story in the drip flow of job losses and bankruptcies in the US arts sector.

Elsewhere that week, San Diego’s Museum of Art and Institute of Contemporary Art was laying off staff, while New York’s School of Visual Arts was cancelling courses as it confronted a $22 million structural deficit. Its interim president, Christopher J. Cyphers described an “ongoing dismantling of education and the arts by the federal government”.

Yet this announcement felt significant; symbolic of a more seismic shift. And for San Francisco, it carried a particular historical weight.

A Cornerstone of the Bay Area Art Scene

Set up during the cultural ferment of the 1970s, the gallery and community space was an artist-led alternative to museums and commercial galleries, supporting emerging photographers and curators and giving early career shows to Joel-Peter Witkin, Allan Sekula and Uta Barth.

It was born in an era of radical change and experimentation, before the dot-com boom began transforming San Francisco in the mid-1990s and sending property costs spiraling.

SF Camerawork. Photo: Dave Zahrobsky for Drew Altizer Photography.

Now that the post-pandemic AI tech boom has triggered another surge in property prices, can the city’s culture of co-operatives and independent art spaces flourish alongside the flood of new money? Or is it becoming too expensive to sustain the very communities that had helped shape its identity?

San Francisco has a long and storied history with photography, helping establish the medium as a modern art form. Group f.64, whose members included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, emerged in the Bay Area in 1932. And the museum now known as SFMOMA began collecting and exhibiting photographs when it opened in 1935, becoming one of the first museums anywhere to accord the medium the status of painting and sculpture.

A decade later, Adams founded a photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed San Francisco Art Institute), helping establish the educational foundations on which successive generations would build.

Almost a century later, photography remains central to the city’s cultural life, from SFMOMA’s collection to commercial galleries such as Fraenkel and the experimental practices Camerawork has championed. Yet the closure of San Francisco Art Institute and Pier 24 in recent years, alongside the impending loss of California College of the Arts, has weakened the infrastructure that sustains that scene.

A Surprising Closure

Even so, the announcement of Cameraworks's closure caught Hal Fischer off guard. Which is odd, given that he was one of the founding artists of the gallery, and was a prominent art critic and museum professional for four decades.

‘Have you heard anything?’ he rang and asked Monique Deschaines, a former board member who runs her own gallery, Equinom, in downtown San Francisco. She had also been surprised by the announcement.

“The previous board were trying their hardest to fundraise and to get money, and they had reached out to a few people that I know of, but it wasn’t enough,” Deschaines tells The Art Journal, perplexed by the lack of urgency. “There’s a difference between doing a fundraising campaign versus saying, ‘We’re at emergency status, we think we’re about to close’.”

Installation view of SF Camerawork’s exhibition 'TAPE UP: The Members Show'. Photo: Alex Ramos, courtesy of SF Camerawork

An announcement was made on 10 August stating that rising operating costs, declining public funding and a changing philanthropic landscape had made its future unsustainable. Its current exhibition would end six days later, with operations due to cease that month. ‘SF Camerawork is not alone in facing these pressures; arts organisations across the country are confronting similar challenges,’ read the statement, adding that its public operations would cease that same week.

Fischer and Deschaines realised that if there was any chance of saving Camerawork, they needed to step in quickly. The outgoing board was giving away assets, seeking a home for the archive and preparing to shut down the website.

Remarkably, on 29 August, Camerawork announced its survival under an entirely new board, with Deschaines as interim executive director and Fischer as board president. Then, days later came a $1 million state funding allocation, spread over two years. For a city that has lost some important arts institutions in recent years, it was a welcome reversal.

But Camerawork’s recovery also raises questions about how an organisation can lose contact with the community that sustains it, and the pivotal role of the boards of not-for-profit organisations .

Path Towards Recovery

Fischer, whose series Gay Semiotics established photography as a means of examining the codes of queer identity, had helped secure Camerawork’s nonprofit status in 1977. And he’d returned as interim director in 2010, during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. He argues that closure remained avoidable.

Fischer’s account is of a gradual loss of institutional knowledge, fundraising experience and donor relationships, compounded by the pandemic’s disruption of earned income. New executive directors, he says, were expected to raise money without the longstanding connections that make such work possible. “It’s the board that needs to have the contacts to individual donors,” he tells The Art Journal.

Fischer drafted a rescue proposal, while Deschaines worked on programming. They assembled supporters, sought emergency funding and took their case to the press. The response confirmed that Camerawork still mattered to photographers and arts professionals well beyond the Bay Area.

Local coverage also reached California governor Gavin Newsom. Through the event designer and philanthropic connector Stanlee Gatti, the rescuers were asked to submit a funding proposal. Deschaines recalls having just 90 minutes to prepare it with Fischer and former executive director Sharon Tanenbaum. The resulting state allocation provided room to restore programs and rebuild the organisation.

Fischer insists they would have continued without it, through smaller steps and renewed donor support. The grant accelerated that process: “That money allowed us to really accelerate to trying to get back to what I call full programming.”

SF Camerawork’s current board,left to right: Alex Ramos, Alexis Gordon, Hal Fischer, Sharon Tanenbaum, Adrian Martinez, Monique Deschaines, and Dave Elfving. Photo: Dave Zahrobsky for Drew Altizer Photography.

Under Marnie Gillett, director from 1984 until her death in 2004, exhibitions, publications and discussion made Camerawork a substantial force. The ambition now is to recover that breadth.

The exorbitant cost of living adds one pressure the founders didn’t have to deal with. Technology booms repeatedly reshaped property markets, making housing, studios and salaries harder to afford. Fischer describes Camerawork’s experience as “a long history of real-estate car crashes”. Its move from Market Street to Fort Mason in 2022 nevertheless offers advantages: a nonprofit landlord and visitors who might never have sought out its previous premises.

Camerawork’s return began with Tape Up, a members’ exhibition celebrating figures from the past 50 years, for which more than 115 photographers installed their pictures with coloured tape. It runs until 25 October.

Next comes its longstanding juried exhibition, Forecast. Deschaines also plans to revive the fine-print fundraising programme, with works priced from $300 to $1,000, and hopes to find a partner to bring back the journal. Reconnecting former members and attracting younger photographers are equally important, she says.

The grant provides a two-years timeline in which to rebuild. Lasting security will require staff, dependable income and continued public engagement. For Fischer, the loss of other opportunities strengthens the case for Camerawork. For Deschaines, its purpose is straightforward: “It should be a community place.”