Adjusting our Focus: the Tech Boom through a Different Lens

The San Francisco Bay Area is considered a hub of innovation, a kind of haven for entrepreneurs and tech dreamers. But, despite the seemingly endless stream of tales about successful tech tycoons, The Valley is also plagued with stark inequality. This past weekend, Catchlight, a nonprofit organization that seeks to spark discussions around social issues using work from emerging photographers, produced an exhibition at SOMArts Center centered on themes of chance, change, and inequality in the Bay Area. Curated by Pete Brook and Rian Dundon, “Status Update” displayed work from fourteen local artists that looked at all kinds of disparities in the region from a diverse set of perspectives.

One collection, Laura Morton’s “Wild West Tech,” compares the Silicon Valley tech boom to the Gold Rush. “San Francisco in particular has always been a boom-bust place,” she says. Morton took a photojournalistic approach to document startup culture, capturing sleep-deprived tech dreamers hunched over their laptops at a 36-hour hackathon; or trying to catch some sleep in tiny overpriced apartments while they wait for their big break. “These are not the people riding the Google buses,” the curator’s description read. These are the “…bootstrapping young idealists with a willingness to tough it out on their way to the top…a type of newcomer that San Francisco has embraced for centuries.”

Another featured photographer, Robert Gumpert, displayed part of his “Take A Picture, Tell A Story” series, which features black and white portraits of prisoners in San Francisco jails alongside their videotaped interviews with the photographer. Gumpert has been working on the personal project off and on for ten years. “‘I take your photo, you tell me a story’ pretty much sums up the idea,” he said of the project during a curator walk-through on Sunday, where he made a surprise appearance.

Also on display: a video documentary chronicling Line 22, a 24-hour bus route that shuttles between San Jose and Palo Alto. The 90-minute route has become a kind of mobile homeless shelter for victims of rising housing costs and the lack of space in local shelters. Elizabeth Lo’s “Hotel 22” seeks to promote awareness about a microcosm that often goes unnoticed. Lo is a Stanford alumna, who heard about this phenomenon while living here as an undergraduate student. She filmed over the course of one week, and then spliced segments together to create an eight-minute composite representing one night on the bus. The result is an award-winning documentary about the plight of the homeless in a region so focused on getting ahead that it neglects to care for those it leaves behind.

These displays along with eleven others presented a diverse array of persistent inequalities shaping social dynamics in the Bay Area. From beautifully captured portraits to poignant exposés, Catchlight produced an unapologetically provocative exhibit that successfully sparked both discussion and reflection and raised awareness about injustices in our own backyard.