Sea Change: Photographs from the Collection speaks to photography’s power to register all kinds of transformation — environmental, cultural, political, and personal — and to contemplate the nature of change itself. As the photographs in Sea Change attest, change is a dependable constant that can be powerfully grasped with the shutter of a camera. Featuring approximately 200 works drawn from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition comprises eight galleries that probe the theme of change from various angles.
One gallery, titled Fire and Water, illustrates how photography has been integral in sounding the alarm about climate change. The Bay Area’s recent extreme weather events, from the 2020 California wildfires to this year’s atmospheric rivers, have signaled a climate reckoning in the West. Fire and Water bears witness to those lived experiences through a series of photographs portraying natural disasters and their aftermath. Organized around the opposing forces of fire and water, the gallery presents seventeen works that reveal the destructiveness of these elements on the natural and human-made world.
“Extremes of weather and climate are now embedded in our collective consciousness as Californians,” notes Sally Martin Katz, curatorial associate of photography, who curated Sea Change, alongside Emilia Mickevicius, former curatorial associate of photography; Erin O’Toole, curator and head of photography; and Shana Lopes, assistant curator of photography. “For non-Californians, these photographs provide a tangible visual representation of the climate crisis, and for Californians, these photographs represent our new reality.”
Lisa Oppenheim’s Spectators sitting on hillside watching fires consume the city after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (1906/2016) eliminates the particulars of people and place to create a universal representation of humankind’s struggle to impose order over the environment. To create the photograph, Oppenheim cropped and abstracted the smoke from an image of the fire that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. “Works like Oppenheim’s take on new meaning given the context of our current experience living with wildfires in California,” adds Katz.
Elsewhere in the gallery, Richard Misrach’s series of photographs taken after Hurricane Katrina depicts fallen trees, boats crushed by cars, and spray-painted calls for help. Photographs of wildfire smoke, flash flooding, and oil spills by artists including Young Suh, Joel Sternfeld, and Zoe Strauss round out the presentation.
In addition to Fire and Water’s exploration of environmental transformation, the other seven thought-provoking galleries in Sea Change demonstrate the medium’s capacity to understand shifts both past and present. Looking Back focuses on French and British photographs from the 19th century, illuminating how people have always resisted change and felt compelled to reminisce about the past. Something Happened foregrounds the work of contemporary artists who consider how history is documented, remembered, and forgotten through the medium of photography. Y2K recalls the visual culture and major milestones of the turn of the millennium, while Looking Forward examines how SFMOMA’s collection is expanding to include a more diverse array of artists. Being and Belonging at Yosemite incorporates the perspectives of tribal communities affiliated with the region to tell a more complete story about photography’s relationship to the national parks. An in-depth gallery is devoted to Ilse Bing’s photographs of interwar Europe and New York, and another gallery spotlights Reagan Louie, a Bay Area–based Chinese American photographer whose work documents major changes in China during the 1980s. Collectively, the galleries in Sea Change show how our continual reinterpretation of photographs allows us to better understand the evolution of our current moment.
Sea Change: Photographs from the Collection is on view through March 17, 2024, on Floor 3.