San Francisco, Moscone Center
2003 - Photography (Photography)
11 5/16 x 17 inches
Richard Gordon
San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The mundanity of the scene is unsettled when we realize a surveillance camera on the top right corner reciprocates the stare of Gordon’s lens, or perhaps the other way. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space. In this new urban landscape, scrutiny and fear can be seen concretely through the normalized, ubiquitous presence of surveillance technology that Gordon captures.
Originally from Chicago, Richard Gordon was a self-taught photographer best known for his intelligent and masterfully printed black-and-white photographs. He began taking photographs in the 60s in Chicago and soon traversed across the country, documenting the public and private lives of Americans through his idiosyncratic lens. He eventually settled in Berkeley, California where in addition to his practice as a photographer he worked as a teacher and writer, as well as producing a series of beautifully crafted handmade artist books, self-published under the moniker Chimera Press. As an untrained artist, and due to his deadpan style, Gordon was initially described as a documentary photographer, a label that he rejected stating that his interest was never in the subjects that he photographed but rather in the way the final image looked. Influenced by household names such as Robert Frank and Walker Evans, Gordon emulated their craft, wryly observing and capturing the culture around him with a Leica.
