Pieter Hugo Spotlights An Overlooked San Francisco Community

Fall brings an exhibition by South African photographer Pieter Hugo to Jonathan Carver Moore’s eponymous contemporary art gallery. Hugo began capturing San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where the gallery is located, while in residency at Marin’s Headlands Center for the Arts in 2015. “I met people with mental disorders, addicts, victims of the 2008 recession, war veterans, men and women who had made bad lifestyle choices, as well as people who, for whatever reason, liked living rough,” he recalls. “Notwithstanding their terrible circumstances, which are real and inescapable, there is something quite ecstatic in the poses and gestures of the people I photographed.”

The series, on view through November 2, resonated with Carver Moore. “These photos are special to me because they not only represent a continued sense of community, but they also show the landscape in which we live,” he says, adding that the body of work “champions a group of people who are overlooked and underrepresented, which fits into the gallery’s programming.”