Back to the Bay
Images from my on-going series on the San Francisco Bay Area
I Left My Heart...
I would not say I am a traveler. I never experienced that desire to explore new places and I’ve never listed traveling the world as a life goal. In childhood, family trips were few in number and were filled with conflict and turmoil amongst my parents and I. Perhaps this is why extended travel is a source of anxiety. Years before I began my graduate studies, I was carefree in my desire to visit Japan. It felt like something that couldn’t actually happen. As I started taking courses on Japanese art history and researching kawaii (cute) culture, both my desire to travel to Japan and to address my anxiety and mental health increased. Only recently have I been able to work through my fears surrounding travel.
The upheaval brought about by the pandemic necessitated a shift in my research and allowed me to work through my anxieties. I wondered how I could “find Japan” in localized travel for my research. Aesthetically, many of my interests were born in Japan. The kitschy and cheap objects from thrift stores and discount shops were frequently made in Japan. Big-eyed cute characters dominated the cultural landscape of my childhood. When I thought of San Francisco, I thought of how this place was a literal entry point to the States for these commodities.
In many ways San Francisco, with its ranging neighborhoods, simulates foreign travel. Each area of the city overlaps and meshes while retaining personality and creates the impression of a city of many cities. When planning my first visit, I knew I wanted to visit Japantown and Golden Gate’s tea garden, as in my eyes this was as close as I could get to Japan. I was unsure of where this research would take me and what my thesis exhibition might look like. The unknown is easily tied to anxiety. Almost immediately upon my arrival in the city, I felt a connection. This connection enabled me to suspend my anxiety about the unknown.
Within a day I had fallen in love. I’ve never had such a viscerally positive reaction to a place. I wandered aimlessly for hours and made hundreds of photographs. While I did photograph some icons, I found myself more drawn to details and the everyday. Photographs allow me to collect the uncollectable. Any images photographers make are about themselves (some more so than others). The decisions of composition and design and not to mention what they choose to examine closely all tell something of the photographer’s character, their desires, and their hopes. In my obsessive post-trip research, I grasped threads to tie me back to those places. I was like an adolescent with a crush striving to know everything about the object of my affections. I began collecting mid-century souvenirs that fed my love of kitsch. With my dozens of postcards, maps, assorted ephemera, souvenirs, and my photo proofs I began to earnestly plan my return. I wondered if my love was fleeting and that no more images would beckon me to be made. My doubts were quickly dispelled; if anything, my love and interest grew and continues to grow.
I Left My Heart…
Kayla Bauer, 2022
Stay With Me
Pax Mortem
My photographs operate as a way for me to collect and memorialize the ephemeral. I am influenced by collections of objects and the memories and emotions attached to them. The photograph as an object itself to be collected also inspires me to photograph particular subjects.
Some of my images depict a dead subject, but look to Victorian post-mortem photography, and work to create an image that is peaceful and respectful, not voyeuristic. Other photographs are like pressed flower collections in that they are a way for me to capture and keep these ethereal beings and moments. I believe that when I photograph someone or something, I ensure their existence is not just catalogued but also remembered.
My subjects exist as a dichotomy between the natural and unnatural. I treat a flocked animal and a self-portrait as subjects both worthy of preservation. The inherent kitsch of some of my subject matter is not treated as a negative but rather something to embrace. I see an inanimate figurine as holding as much interest and worth as the deceased body of a beloved cat.
The photographs were created in and exist in a world of nostalgia. The simple pleasure and sadness they invoke moves them past a personal sentimentality to become more universal spaces for viewer introspection.
2016.
Portraits
These portraits were created during a transitional phase. I had just finished my first large body of work and graduated with my BA. These images emphasize my attraction to natural light, using my own body, and a great sense of play.
Personal Document of a Modest Life
Many photographers have documented American life. Some focus on either the personal or the public. I combine images from both of these realms to draw out the complex conversation between intimacy and distance.
In the exhibition “Mirrors and Windows” John Szarkowski said “There is a dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration.” With the definition of mirrors referring to introspective images and windows to the outside world, my images function as both of these. The people and objects I photograph operate between the personal and the universal. My subjects are part of a lower economic class. By including images that are personal, my work goes beyond merely talking about this particular economic class but addresses a way of life. My photographs serve as a document of my life and more broadly the environment in which I live.
2011
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