"A STRANGE VIBRATION: LENN KELLER, DARCY PADILLA, ELIZABETH SUNFLOWER" On view through April 22, 2025

Presented in collaboration with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, Ricki Blakesberg & Retro Photo Archive

A Strange Vibration brings to light work by three photojournalists documenting Bay Area women’s lives at the margins from the 1970s through the 1990s. As we at SFC celebrate our early work championing local artists 50 years ago, this show seeks to include work and perspectives previously overlooked in the halls of many institutions, even our own.

Lenn Keller was a self-taught photographer who documented the Queer Liberation Movement through the eyes of a radical black lesbian, and her work now forms the core of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, housed in Oakland. Darcy Padilla’s work follows life in the Tenderloin’s Ambassador Hotel in the 1990s, where people with AIDS and HIV took care of one another during the peak of the AIDS crisis in the United States. Elizabeth Sunflower was a Bay Area photojournalist, whose archive has recently been rediscovered. A Strange Vibration focuses on her Naked Seduction series, tracking the antics and activism of sex workers in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in the 1960’s and 70’s. Supplemental works from each photographer will contextualize their relationships with the communities they documented from outside and within.