San Francisco: Photographs from the 1980s
This body of work emerged from long, melancholic walks through the streets of San Francisco during a time of profound social and cultural transformation. The 1980s were a gritty era for the City—marked by the AIDS crisis, rising homelessness, widening economic disparity, and the lingering shadows of the Cold War, particularly its manifestations in Latin America. Rather than focusing on people, this series turns its lens toward the quiet interplay of light and shadow across storefront signs, street posters, and window displays. These everyday surfaces became silent witnesses to the turbulence of the time—fragments of a city caught between decay and resilience.

A postcard folio featuring twelve selected works from the San Francisco: Photographs from the 1980s series will be released in August 2025. The folio includes an original essay by renowned curator and art historian Derrick Cartwright, offering critical insight into the images and the historical context in which they were made.

This limited edition of 500 copies will be available at select museum shops and independent bookstores nationwide.

In Los Angeles:
Arcana Books for the Arts
Art Book at Hauser & Wirth
Skylight Books

The Burgers of L.A.
I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the late 1990s to take a job working in a museum bookstore. My daily commute from Echo Park to Pasadena involved transitioning through neighborhoods that featured mid-century vernacular architecture particular to the strip malls and Independent burger joints of Northeast Los Angeles. In the early 2000s, as part of a process of acclimating to my new home, I began photographing some of these fast food restaurants. I was drawn to the stark, simple graphic nature of the architectural elements in these structures. 

As part of my daily work routine at the museum, I crossed a sculpture garden featuring sculptures by Auguste Rodin. One day I noticed that Rodin’s grouping, “The Burghers of Calais” included a figure that when viewed obliquely, appeared to have two hands holding a hamburger. This was the beginning of my journey into The Burgers of L.A.. 

I have collected postcards, photographs and other paper ephemera since my early 20s. In two previous creative projects, Thinking Florida Turn Right: A Portfolio of Handcrafted Photographic Post Cards Displaying Seven Different Views from the Florida Landscape (1981), and The Business (1993), I took inspiration from some of the objects in my collection. The physical structure of these objects as souvenir propaganda was distilled into the presentation of the work. The Burgers of L.A. was published in 2024 as a 12-image fold-out postcard portfolio in an edition of 500, featuring an essay by Jeffrey Herr, as a memento of Los Angeles.

To purchase online:
The Burgers of L.A.
The Burgers of L.A. Cap

Books Read with Friends
During the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, I invited several participants from my Recto-Verso series (2016–2019) to recommend a book for me to read. This project, Books Read with Friends During the Pandemic, began with a simple premise: each person would nominate a title for a hypothetical “Noah’s Ark” of literature.

After reading each selection, I interviewed the recommender and produced a photograph in response to the text. In turn, I asked each participant to contribute a creative response of their own. These exchanges culminated in the creation of two interconnected objects: a photographic work and a custom dust jacket designed to house the book we shared.

Recto-Verso is a photographic project about the process of reading and the connection between the printed book and the human body. The genesis of this project is based on my experience as a museum bookseller as well as a lecture on the connection between books and the body by the art book publisher Sharon Helgason Gallager, given during a period of anxiety about the vulnerability of printed books in an emerging digital era. 

In each of these works, the subject is engaged in the act of reading whereby I then physically remove the book from their hands and then take a photograph. The photographs are made in natural light using black and white film in a medium format camera. The processed film is scanned and printed as an archival inkjet print.

The Reader Series is a photographic exploration of the book as physical form, cultural marker, and visual word poem. My approach to artistic process is conceptual in structure but intuitively based and reflects a personal relationship with the subject that I am photographing. At its core, this series of photographs reflects my long-standing fascination with the visual display of language, from the style of type font to its engagement with print and design.

Books speak about the culture and time in which they are created. Their current use and valuation reflects contemporary concerns about technology, information media, and the economy. As books age and deteriorate they mirror our own physical issues about age and decay. The text on the spine, cover or title page becomes a poignant narrative of time, place and meaning.

These photographs are made using sheet film with a view camera. The finished exposure is then scanned and digitally printed. This analog to digital process mirrors many aspects of the contested nature of the printed book. The white space around the photo object emphasizes both material physicality and its absence.

The Business
The Business (1993) was the culmination of a multi-year project examining constructions of masculinity and gender identity. The business card format is appropriated as a mechanism through which authority is constructed, performed, and exchanged.

The texts on these business cards were extracted from newspapers, magazines, and books addressing these themes. The typographic design of these cards were developed in collaboration with San Francisco–based designer Erica Riggs.

Thinking Florida Turn Right was a photographic project I undertook between 1978 and 1980, accompanied by fellow photographer Don Hall. This project emerged from my interest in the vernacular: handmade signs, mom and pop tourist attractions, aging motels and citrus stands. Using his VW Bug as a mobile observation post, we traveled Florida’s backroads, seeking out the remnants of an earlier, independently imagined tourist infrastructure. The result is a collection of work that captures the fleeting character of a landscape on the brink of homogenization and mass commercial development. In 1980, I printed a folio featuring seven of these images in an edition of 30. Each print, postcard-sized, was hand-printed on Agfa Portriga Rapid paper and toned in selenium for richness and longevity. The text on the backs of the prints was printed on a Heidelberg letterpress at Storter Printing Co. in Gainesville, Florida. The finished prints were hand-trimmed on a vintage deckle edge cutting board.

Andrew Uchin
andrewuchin@yahoo.com