The Gray Area - Uncertain Images: Bay Area Photography 1970s to now

The Gray Area seeks to reimagine the Bay Area as the "Gray Area"—an amorphous, ambiguous, and ultimately fictional geography, pervaded by uncertainty and doubt—by exploring some of the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity in Bay Area photography produced over the past three decades. The selection of artists and works is intentionally broad, yet behind each image there exists a substantial investment in photography's potential to create a sense of unease.

Many of the works in The Gray Area offer a pessimistic, almost dystopian, take on the typical idealized image of West Coast life. The clichéd perennial blue skies of California are often supplanted by murky nocturnal images that invoke a sense of urban or suburban foreboding. Yet ultimately what unites these photographers and photographs is an appreciation of photography's potential to dramatize and amplify the quotidian world. Truth becomes an elastic category that enters into the realm of fiction, and photography—and the photographic images themselves—become an unstable, shifting, and unsettling terrain.