Art

Michael Jang’s is a unique story. For the last forty years, he has earned a living as a portrait photographer, capturing iconic figures such as Jimi Hendrix, Robin Williams, and William Burroughs, among others. However, this unassuming Asian-American photographer has also been simultaneously infiltrating and documenting a number of groups and subcultures from all strata of society: from celebrity parties in Beverly Hills to the youth of Castro’s Cuba, from South City gangs to Old West rodeos, and from the punk rock scene of the late 70s to the teenage garage bands of early 2000s San Francisco. His images are allegories of particular points in time, characterized by their candid honesty, decisiveness, and vivacity. SFMoMA has recently acquired a number of his early prints and has exhibited them alongside contemporaries such as Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander. “It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what makes Jang’s work so captivating, which is precisely what makes Jang’s work so captivating… He’s a storyteller, skilled in the art of deception, or perhaps it’s more misdirection. At first glance at one of his images you get one story, look again and you’ll get three others. He’s a master of photographic omission, his work is as much about what’s not there as what is.” – Erik Kessels “Who is Michael Jang? I don’t know if he’s a hipster or a nerd, a conceptual genius or instinctual savant. All I know is that he takes some of the best pictures I’ve ever seen.” – Alec Soth “If you had to invent a photographer who captured the essence of California in the 1970s and 80’s – its exuberance and dubious fashion sense, its rebellious subcultures and obsessions with celebrity – you would have to invent Michael Jang. His work is idiosyncratic and yet somehow imbued with his infectious personality, fresh and suited to these eclectic times, and he’s gone from being a largely forgotten portrait photographer, who stored his archive in boxes in his garage, to a respected figure on the Californian photography scene.” – Stephen McLaren British Journal of Photography, September 2015. It’s interesting to compare this show with Garry Winogrand at SFMOMA - “The Jangs” offers a good dose what Winogrand’s work is missing. Personalities that jump across multiple contact sheets, people who know each other, relationships. If Robert Frank overlooked the suburbs and the seeds of American sprawl, Winogrand picked up on that, but then entirely missed what was going on inside the new construction. – Wayne Bremser The 70's. That golden age for photography, in which a new generation of artists put all of their interest in the medium, developing new techniques and investigating revolutionary formats. Michael Jang is one of them. Sharing walls at the SFMOMA next to other big ones such as William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, Jang's images take us to a past time which everything could be summed up to the strength of change. Where everything is yet to be done and there's eagerness to do it. And there he is, restless. Those first punk subculture snaps of the time, with the Ramones, Avengers and many others was just the beginning. We love Jang's photography because of its strength, because it brings young Bowie back and the adolescent garage boys, because he's witness of a time and of a true shot. – Lamono Magazine Previously under-the-radar San Francisco-based photographer Michael Jang has an unequivocal knack for capturing something virtually uncapturable in the people, places and things that populate his black-and-white snapshot and portrait photographs. No family member, celebrity, punk or poet is immune. A master of detection-evasion, over the past forty years he has quietly placed himself in both high- and low-profile events and locations and miraculously photographed strange or unique energy with his camera. This hefty, beautifully-produced, clothbound first major monograph from London-based Atelier Éditions highlights five decades of virtually unknown work over 250 pages—sophisticated and surprising coffee table gold. – ARTBOOK/DAP