By Judith Kahn

Roy Tahtinen conceived of his current photographic series on Valentine’s Day in 2016, when he made “an unintentional pivot” while collecting stones at Ocean Beach.

Instead of pocketing them, he began photographing the heart-shaped stones where they lay, posting one new heart image each day on social media. Since then, he continues to post one photo every day from some corner of the City.

He has always noticed images in objects around him that were not placed there intentionally. For example, he might see a face in a tree, an animal in a cloud, a number in a leaf, or many other shapes that appear in nature or in manufactured objects. Many people have experienced this phenomenon to some degree.

Roy Tahtinen has a knack for seeing hearts wherever he goes. He pairs his heart photos with quotations as “a form of meditation, a method to develop as an artist and an amazing way to connect with people from all over the world.” Courtesy photo.

On that Valentine’s Day, he realized that through photographing these objects in their immediate context, they could be shared more widely. In his ongoing exploration, Tahtinen realized the objects took on added meaning when photographed where they were found. Now, as the photographs become social media posts, many more people around the world can see what Tahtinen sees and form their own impressions.

On a practical level, this also freed him from the habit of collecting found objects and unloading them into the drawers and shelves of his small Sunset District flat.

“I decided I needed to stop this practice when I ran out of places to keep them,” Tahtinen said.

“The concept of focusing on hearts specifically was inspired by Tony Bennet’s song ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ as well as my personal love for this amazing City,” he explained. “So, in exploring how to combine my unique way of seeing things – San Francisco’s connection with hearts, and my love of the City – I decided, ‘If you left your heart in San Francisco, I am going to try to find it.’”

In 2018, he challenged himself to post a photograph of one new heart to Instagram every day.

“This is when I started the series, HeartSFound,” he said. “And this is where things started to get meaningful.”

Tahtinen admits that while he has produced other photographic series, the term “series” might be an understatement with the hearts, which he’s been posting daily for five years.

Tahtinen selects a photograph each morning and pairs it with a quotation that either reflects the image or contrasts with it in a surprising way.

“Personally, it has been a form of meditation, a method to develop as an artist and an amazing way to connect with people from all over the world,” he said.

Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tahtinen worked in advertising and was looking for creative opportunities before moving here in 2000. He is not a full-time photographer.

“I think any fine arts pursuit is difficult to do full time if you want to pay the bills,” he said.

He said he feels lucky to have found a career that fosters and encourages creativity.

“The (advertising) work that was coming out of San Francisco was so original,” he said.

It was the dot-com boom, with lots of money and creativity behind many thriving brands, such as Levi’s, SF Giants and Williams-Sonoma. In 2022, he started working with the brand design team at Peet’s Coffee, his current position.

Tahtinen is curating his favorite heart images to create a book. He is working through how to compose it, which quotations to use to support the images, and how to produce it.

“I started making various collections and playing around with how photos work together and I am letting that drive the development.”

Tahtinen finds the greatest return on his creativity is “showing other people my perspective of the world and having them appreciate the way I see it. This is validating and rewarding because it is so personal.” He adds, “I am well aware that many parts of our lives seem designed to discourage creativity. So, the first reward of being artists or creatives is the freedom to be ourselves and not fight for permission.”

Seaside Buckwheat at Golden Gate Bridge by Roy Tahtinen.

His other interests are traveling and walking, the latter a daily activity for him. The beauty, diversity and walkability of SF inspire him to “walk more, to explore the City and to slow down and see more of what is around me.”

He describes his hometown of Grand Rapids as “actually a really fantastic place. I intended on moving back after a year or two, but I fell in love with the City and have made San Francisco my home.”

Two of Roy Tahtinen’s photos showing heart-shaped holes he observed in wood and rock carved by natural forces. See a large collection of his work at the Hunt & Gather art gallery at 1108 Irving St. and on his website, heartSFound.art.

Tahtinen posts daily to Instagram and Facebook – @HeartSFound.art and HeartSFound.art, respectively – and Next Door, under Roy Tahtinen, offering a positive, bright spot on the often contentious social media platform. His largest current physical installation is showing in the Sunset District at Hunt & Gather, located at 1108 Irving St. There, you can find framed prints along with bookmarks and greeting cards. Tahtinen’s cards and prints are also found in little shops around San Francisco, but he hopes to find wider distribution.

Tahtinen said his book will be a love note to San Francisco.

“I am inspired by those who left their hearts here,” he said. “There are so many shapes a heart can come in. It can be broken or whole. Wet or dry. Positive or negative. Symmetrical or eclectic. All beautiful in their own way. So, the book is also a celebration of diversity and inclusion. We are all so different, yet at the same time, we are all the same.”

See his work at heartsfound.art.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s groundbreaking career in politics was documented in photos from the moment she was sworn in as San Francisco mayor in the aftermath of tragedy to her long-awaited return to the U.S. Senate after illness earlier this year.

The pictures start in black and white, showing a young Feinstein as she leads an estimated 15,000 marchers in memory of slain Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She became the city’s first female mayor after their assassination in 1978 and held the office for nearly a decade.

As mayor, she helped secure millions of dollars from the federal government to refurbish the city’s iconic cable cars and took a celebratory ride with Tony Bennett, who famously crooned of leaving his heart in San Francisco.

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The photos turn into color as Feinstein broke more barriers. She won a U.S. Senate race in 1992 to become one of California’s first two female senators. She was the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat.

She was the longest-tenured female senator in U.S. history and oldest sitting senator when she died Thursday at age 90 at her Washington, D.C., home.

Along the way, a playful Feinstein flexed a bicep in support of California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $9 billion water bond for the state and linked arms with GOP President George W. Bush as they toured wildfire damage in San Diego. The centrist Democrat valued working with Republicans across the aisle.

One of her most significant legislative accomplishments came at the start of her career when the Senate approved her amendment to ban the manufacturing and sale of certain types of semi-automatic guns. The legislation expired a decade later, in 2014, and was never revived despite efforts by gun control advocates.

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During debate on the ban, Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig suggested Feinstein study up on the issue of guns. ″Senator, I know something about what firearms can do,” she replied.

Feinstein’s lengthy career was marred by illness and frustration among fellow Democrats over her health. She returned to Capitol Hill in May after more than two months out while recovering from the shingles virus.

Tributes poured in Friday for Feinstein.

The post Pictures documented US Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s groundbreaking profession in politics appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s groundbreaking career in politics was documented in photos from the moment she was sworn in as San Francisco mayor in the aftermath of tragedy to her long-awaited return to the U.S. Senate after illness earlier this year.

The pictures start in black and white, showing a young Feinstein as she leads an estimated 15,000 marchers in memory of slain Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She became the city’s first female mayor after their assassination in 1978 and held the office for nearly a decade.

As mayor, she helped secure millions of dollars from the federal government to refurbish the city’s iconic cable cars and took a celebratory ride with Tony Bennett, who famously crooned of leaving his heart in San Francisco.

The photos turn into color as Feinstein broke more barriers. She won a U.S. Senate race in 1992 to become one of California’s first two female senators. She was the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat.

She was the longest-tenured female senator in U.S. history and oldest sitting senator when she died Thursday at age 90 at her Washington, D.C., home.

Along the way, a playful Feinstein flexed a bicep in support of California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $9 billion water bond for the state and linked arms with GOP President George W. Bush as they toured wildfire damage in San Diego. The centrist Democrat valued working with Republicans across the aisle.

One of her most significant legislative accomplishments came at the start of her career when the Senate approved her amendment to ban the manufacturing and sale of certain types of semi-automatic guns. The legislation expired a decade later, in 2014, and was never revived despite efforts by gun control advocates.

During debate on the ban, Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig suggested Feinstein study up on the issue of guns. ″Senator, I know something about what firearms can do,” she replied.

Feinstein’s lengthy career was marred by illness and frustration among fellow Democrats over her health. She returned to Capitol Hill in May after more than two months out while recovering from the shingles virus.

Tributes poured in Friday for Feinstein.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Although he lives in one of the most photographed places in the world, Michael Wolf has never been short of creative, unique ideas. Be it photographing street view scenes or, in this case, demonstrating his incredible compositional skills with photographs of Parisian roofs that look like two-dimensional, abstract paintings.

Wolf has always been fascinated by photographing life in big cities. While living in Hong Kong, he raised his eyebrows by photographing people through the windows of their high-rise apartments without knowledge or consent.

Even now in Paris, Wolf’s photography is still architectural, albeit far less controversial. Paris Abstract explores the rooftops of densely packed Parisian neighborhoods, photographed with everything in focus, so that the viewer finds himself lost in the geometry of these buildings and wonders whether it is reality or a painting that he is looking at:

To learn more about the Paris Abstract series, visit the Robert Koch Gallery website (or visit in person until September 6 if you live in San Francisco). And if you’d like to see more of Wolf’s work, read our previous coverage or visit his website by clicking here.

(via Colossal)

Photo credit: Photos by Michael Wolf and used with permission

The post These Pictures of Parisian Rooftops Look Like Summary Work appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Catherine Opie and I are sitting face to face, each framed by the rectangular computer screens that, as with the rest of us, have become our windows on the world. But in this case, there is a difference. Seeing her settled comfortably in a chair, her cheerful, bespectacled face looking directly into the camera, I realise how familiar this framing must be to her. It is almost exactly the same as the one she often chooses for her portraits, which she has been making since the early 1990s and which run like a ground bass beneath her other photographic works.

Her earliest portraits were statements about gender identity and sexual orientation, and her sitters were friends from the BDSM and leather community in San Francisco, the city where she studied in the mid-1980s. In her first series, “Being and Having” (1991), each subject was shot in close-up, against a bright yellow background, wearing a fake moustache or beard: in sync with the theory of the time, it suggested gender was essentially performative.

A second series, “Portraits” (1993-97), this time both single figures and couples, followed, and it was then she decided on the formal construction of her portraits. With some adjustments, she has used it ever since: the sitter placed against a strongly coloured background — jewel colours of deep greens and purples, reds and blues — looking directly into the camera and situated centrally in the frame. This rather conservative visual architecture was inspired, she explains, by seeing portraits by 16th-century artist Hans Holbein the Younger. She wanted to show the members of her community as being “incredibly noble”.

It’s a word she still uses when talking about her portraits, some of which now hang in museums and public galleries across the globe. Her more recent sitters tend to be friends and colleagues from the art world, such as artists Gillian Wearing, Anish Kapoor and David Hockney and the New Yorker writer and curator Hilton Als.

‘Chicken’, 1991, from the series Being and Having

The portraits, she says, belong to a line that runs through the history of painting to photography: “They’re meant to be timeless but also of the time, and that is really hard to do with a camera. But when you bring in the conversation about the history of painting imbued within this work, it changes the way you as a viewer enter it, too.”

I’d read that she demands total control in the studio. When I ask whether her sitters ever resist, she says firmly: “No. When I enter the studio, they know who I am.”

Opie, who has lived in California for most of her life, turned 60 in April. Across almost four decades, her work has shifted between gender politics and a wider exploration of the American landscape, looking in particular at ways in which the environment has shaped and been shaped by the communities that inhabit it.

‘Angela Scheirl’, 1993, from the series Portraits (1993-97)

She entered the art world during the 1990s, when conceptualism had become the dominant mode in photography, and documentary — what she sometimes refers to as “storytelling” — had been pushed to the margins. Her work is rooted in documentary, but made with a conceptual formality that has secured her reputation.

It is while we are talking about this that I realise, with something of a jolt, that on screen she is framed in almost exactly the same position as in the pair of early self-portraits that brought her to public attention when they were shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1995. Twenty-five years later, they probably still count as her most famous pictures, which she’s had to explain, and to a degree justify, ever since.

In the first, “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993), the back of Opie’s head and upper torso are framed by the camera. She is naked, bar a tattoo around her right bicep, and between her shoulder blades, carved into her flesh in the style of a child’s drawing, are two stick figures, both wearing skirts, holding hands. Behind them is a house, with smoke coming from the chimney, and above them the sun peeps out over a cloud as a couple of birds fly by. It was a reaction, she said later, to the break-up of a relationship that she thought was going to provide her with a home. It was her version of a little lesbian utopia, carved in blood.

Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993.

The second image was more extreme. In “Self-Portrait/Pervert” (1994), she is naked to the waist, this time facing the camera, but her head is covered by a full BDSM leather hood — the kind made familiar to the art-going public by Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio”. She has a ring through her right nipple, and down each arm, from shoulder to wrist, a line of hypodermic needles has been threaded in and out of the flesh. There is a black-and-gold backdrop behind her; her fingers are quietly laced together in her lap. Across her chest, above her breasts, the word “Pervert” has been carved in a blood-red cursive script with what somehow manages to suggest a flourish.

The two images are so shocking, so confrontational: once seen they are hard to forget. It’s a struggle to reconcile them with the warm, friendly person on the other side of the screen. But facing her on Zoom, I realise I’m in possession of some personal information not normally available in this kind of encounter. Under her sweater, the tracery of the scars must still be there.

When I ask her about those pictures, she says: “That work came around because of Aids and identity politics and homophobia. It would never have been made without becoming an activist and part of ACT UP and Queer Nation . . . You have to realise that I had an entire community of friends die of Aids, and blood was what was feared.”

Catherine Opie photographed at her studio in LA © Devyn Galindo

I wonder if, looking back, she felt the self-portraits had been crucial to the development of her work, or hampered it — maybe given people a false idea about her?

“I think it was both. I never regretted it,” she says. “I couldn’t live with ‘Pervert’, but I have never regretted making it. It’s too hard of an image of myself to live with on a daily basis, because it’s an expression that I did at a very specific time because I was upset, and I was angry. But it isn’t the whole sum of me as a person . . . People automatically assume that that’s the sum of you, and it’s only a piece, only a fragment of a puzzle, so to speak.”

This month, Phaidon publishes a book dedicated to Opie’s life and work across her entire career, from her earliest portraits to her most recent installation, “Rhetorical Landscapes”, which combines animated political collages made during the Trump era with studies of serene but ecologically fragile Florida swamps — an invocation of the twin dangers facing contemporary America.

‘Oliver in a Tutu’, 2004

The book collects her works thematically rather than chronologically, with sections on “People”, “Place” and “Politics”, accompanied by essays and interviews. The introductory essay on the concept of home by curator Elizabeth AT Smith reveals a central paradox of Opie’s life and work: for all her extremism, what she always longed for was a stable domestic relationship and a child.

Ten years after those first two self-portraits, she made another, a sort of companion piece — except the distance between the first two and the third seems to measure the limits of her emotional desires. “Self-Portrait/Nursing” (2004) shows her seated, once again naked to the waist, but this time her face is uncovered and in her arms she is cradling an angelic blond child, gazing down at him watchfully as he suckles her left breast. This is her son, Oliver, who is now 19.

Self-Portrait/Nursing, 2004

That same year, she embarked on a new series of photographs which reflected some of the contentment of her domestic life. “In and Around Home” shows Opie with her wife, artist Julie Burleigh, who she met in 1999, in Los Angeles. It is a portrait of a warm, hectic, loving household, complete with toddler, fridge magnets and a dog, and it extends into the local neighbourhood of West Adams in LA.

In some senses, it was a sequel to another series, “Domestic” (1995-98), where she travelled 9,000 miles across the US to photograph lesbian couples in their homes. This was partly motivated by seeing the MoMA exhibition “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort” in 1991 and realising, she has said, that “there was no queer family involved”.

In the mid-1990s, Opie began what would become a parallel preoccupation in her work. She had always been interested in where and how people lived; at the age of nine, when she’d been given her first camera, she had gone round on her bike photographing her local neighbourhood: “I think for me it was a way I made sense of the world.”

‘Flipper, Tanya, Chloe & Harriet, San Francisco, California’, 1995, from the series Domestic

For her postgraduate thesis at the California Institute of Arts in 1988, she made an installation, “Master Plan”, combining photographs of the suburbs of nearby Valencia, on the outskirts of LA, which was being developed as a model community, with architects’ plans, interiors, portraits and interviews with residents. As the early portraits had done, it established a way of exploring how societies were organised by focusing on the buildings and structures around them. “I don’t think very much differently from buildings to people, to be honest,” she says.

The new book covers the totality of her work, from architectural structures such as freeways and mini-malls, ice houses and cityscapes, to portrait studies of high school football players and surfers far out at sea. In 2009, she spent 10 days on a container ship sailing from Korea to Long Beach, photographing the horizon at sunrise and sunset, dividing equal areas of sky and sea.

‘Cobalt Blue Sky’, 2015

When I ask about how she decides to move from one subject to another, she says: “It’s a whirlwind of histories that meld together with how I’m experiencing my life in any given moment. It’s out of a great love of humanity and curiosity and the love of looking. I obviously really like to look. And my wife would say it [should] be, ‘I really love to stare.’”

In 2010-11, Opie found herself inside a Bel Air mansion — similar to those whose pristine, exclusory facades she had photographed in an earlier series, “Houses”. This was 700 Nimes Road, the home of Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor was suffering from ill health at the time so the two never met, but you can imagine Opie padding around the silent rooms with her camera on thick pile carpets with the smell of stale hairspray and perfume in the air.

Untitled #2 (Freeways), 1994

She turned to architecture again for her first film, The Modernist (2018), this time to LA’s famed mid-century houses. Stylistically, it pays homage to Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, but replaces the threat of nuclear devastation with that of fake news and false utopias and what she identified at the time as Trump’s “rhetoric of nostalgia”. Thematically, it links with her involvement in public protest and demonstrations, which she has photographed across the decades and refers to as “political landscapes” rather than street photography, “because [politics] is part of the landscape”.

Last year, she and Burleigh bought a camper van and drove across the southern states to Louisiana. Ostensibly it was to deliver Oliver for his first year at Tulane University. “We couldn’t fly and we wanted to have that parental experience of moving our child into their dorm,” Opie says. “He was leaving home for the first time.”

After dropping him off, they “trekked around the country for three-and-a-half weeks” and Opie is now in the process of editing a body of work called “2020”. “I’m a big believer in the American road trip,” she says. That way she can take the country’s pulse, looking at “the symbols within these landscapes that continue to create this myth of America, especially in terms of racism and the history of slavery . . . You can read everything that you can, but what photographs do is allow you to observe the structure of places and the situation.”

‘Arsonist (The Modernist)’, 2016

I wondered if she felt Oliver was better equipped to join the outside world than she had been at his age. “Oh yeah,” she says, laughing. “Totally different ballgame.” Her father was a Republican and a collector of political campaign memorabilia. Her mother was a teacher and a keen amateur film-maker. When they lived in Ohio, her father ran the family art supplies business, but when they moved to Poway, California, which she says “looked like the middle of a John Wayne movie”, he went into real estate. He made sure Opie got her real estate licence at 18: “He didn’t think the art thing would work out.”

I wonder when she came out to them. “Oh gosh, not till I was in my twenties — 20, 21. Even though I knew I already had crushes in high school it wasn’t until I was in San Francisco that I completely accepted my sexuality.”

How did her parents react? “My dad thought it was cool. Then he got sad that I wouldn’t get married and he wouldn’t be able to walk me down the aisle. And my mom just said, ‘OK, I don’t want to talk about it.’ But through the years she obviously had to come to a better acceptance of it.”

‘Gillian’, 2017, from Portraits and Landscapes

What had drawn her to BDSM and leather in San Francisco? “I think it allowed me to understand consensuality,” she says. “The leather community is one of the most lovely communities that allows you to grapple with whatever’s on your plate in a very humane way. It’s all negotiated . . . It’s amazing to learn what your limits are within your own body in a safe space. Very few people get to have that kind of awareness around their body, especially in their mid-twenties. Most people don’t get to negotiate sex in that way.”

Going back to those early works, she says: “I made the first self-portrait in my early thirties. It’s amazing how many people come up to me and tell me how important those images were for them, and being able to deal with their own sexuality and their own relationship to their bodies and coming out.

“Without work being made in those realms — in the same way that Mapplethorpe made his work — you wouldn’t be able to have those conversations and try to move forward because of representation.” In the end, she adds: “It really just comes down to, well, who gets represented?”

“Catherine Opie” is published by Phaidon

All artworks courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York/Hong Kong/Seoul/London; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Naples; and Peder Lund, Oslo

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