Lisa Blatt—San Francisco

Lisa K. Blatt lives and works in San Francisco, but travels around the world to take landscape photographs and videos with a particular focus on deserts, both hot and cold. She often works in extreme climates, having dodged bombs and bullets from gun-wielding locals and once camping on a live volcano in Antarctica where she survived a Condition One storm trapped in her tent for six nights.

These journeys are not undertaken just for the sake of adventure, but to further Blatt’s artistic research. The relationship between sight and site is paramount in this conceptual work. Drawing on her broad interest in light, perception, and the intersection between nature and culture, Blatt’s artwork explores the way landscape is defined not only by what we see, but also by what we don’t see. These invisible determinants take the form of memory, but also of trace elements left by past events. Contrails from stealth planes once flown over the desert sky and explosions at nuclear testing sites give two clear examples of the way memory and traces we don’t immediately perceive are often even combined. Here landscape represents both presence and absence.

Wayne Levin—Hawaii

Los Angeles native Wayne Levin has been photographing his adopted home of Hawaii for nearly four decades and is known internationally for his striking underwater photographs of swimmers and marine life. He began photographing at age 12 with a Brownie camera given to him by his father. After graduating high school in 1962, he attended Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California but left to participate in the Civil Rights movement in 1964. Over the next several years he worked with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Wayne began his underwater photography in 1983 with the purchase of a Nikonos IV underwater camera. To this day he continues to work with black and white photography underwater, often free-diving without the use of a scuba tank. Throughout his photographic career he has also worked on documentary projects addressing the history of the Hawaiian Islands and humanity’s fraught relationship to oceans and ocean life.

Zack Sumner Schomp—Sebastopol

Zack Sumner Schomp was raised fifty-one miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge in a town celebrated for its apples. An alumni of San Francisco Art Institute and Mills college, he is a practicing artist, lecturer at CSU East Bay and Sonoma State Universities, a darkroom photography instructor at Oxbow School, and the current board president for PhotoAlliance.

Curated by PhotoAlliance founder and creative director Linda Connor, this portfolio includes 20 limited edition prints by local, regional and international photographers. In selecting the works included, Connor envisioned this project not as a greatest hits album, but as a distillation of the creative responses artists have made to the upheaval seen in our political, cultural, environmental and personal spheres in recent years. The works in INSIGHT/INCITE speak to the challenges, hope and resilience that humanity faces as we grapple with a host of profound issues ranging from Covid-19 to Black Lives Matter, from climate change and mass migration, from the new “culture wars” to ongoing struggles with ageism and sexism.

Embracing artists who push the envelope in their own practice of photography in various ways, INSIGHT/INCIT offers the common ground of image as a tool for reflecting, sharing and learning from a multitude of incisive visual perspectives based on diverse identities and backgrounds.