A camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. The image of lensless camera obscuras is also referred to as "pinhole image".
Peter Lamborn Wilson was an American anarchist author and poet, primarily known for his concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, short-lived spaces which elude formal structures of control. During the 1970s, Wilson lived in the Middle East and worked at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the guidance of Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, where he explored mysticism and translated Persian texts. Starting from the 1980s he wrote numerous political writings under the pen name of Hakim Bey, illustrating his theory of "ontological anarchy".
Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. Currently she is the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.
Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry. He spent most of his writing life in San Francisco.
Sally Mann HonFRPS is an American photographer known for making large format black and white photographs of people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, husband, and rural landscapes, as well as self-portraits.
Vince Aletti is a curator, writer, and photography critic.
Nancy Wynne Newhall was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.
Norma Cole is a Canadian poet, visual artist, translator, and curator. An Anglophone Canadian by birth, Cole learned French at an early age, and went on to translate the works of French poets Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, Jean Daive, and others with whom she is intellectually allied. In the late 1970s and 1980s Cole was a member of the San Francisco-based circle of poets congregating around Robert Duncan. Her papers are collected at the Archive for New Poetry at the Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California San Diego.
Ron Kolm is an American poet, writer, editor, archivist, and bookseller based in New York City. Known as "one of the mainstays of the downtown (literary) scene," Kolm is also a founder of the Unbearables, a "ragtag bunch of downtown poet-troublemakers."
Richard Misrach is an American photographer. He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic."
Tim Davis is an American visual artist and poet, based in New York City and Tivoli, New York. He is the author and subject of several books of photography, plus a book of poetry. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2007.
Douglas Kent Hall was an American writer and photographer. Hall was a fine art photographer and writer of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, essays, and screenplays. His first published photographs were of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and his first exhibition of photographs was at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Peter Fraser is a British fine art photographer. He was shortlisted for the Citigroup Photography Prize in 2004.
Gerald David "Gerry" Badger is an English writer and curator of photography, and a photographer.
Richard Ross is an American photographer. He is best known for his body of work Juvenile in Justice, which has documented the U.S. juvenile justice system for the last 8 years. The project has been produced with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2007 Ross was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship to finish Architecture of Authority.
Ania Bien is an American photographer. Born in Kraków, Poland, to Polish-Jewish parents, she moved to the United States in 1958, where she studied painting and cultural anthropology. Since 1973 she has lived in Amsterdam.
Doug Rickard was an American artist and photographer. He used technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographed on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard was best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He was founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which published some of his collection of found photographs.
Susan Lipper is an American photographer, based in New York City. Her books include Grapevine (1994), for which she is best known, Trip (2000) and Domesticated Land (2018). Lipper has said that all of her work is "subjective documentary"; the critic Gerry Badger has said many describe it as "ominous".
Abigail Solomon-Godeau is an American art critic, exhibition curator, art historian, and Professor Emerita in art history, University of California, Santa Barbara.
