Posted on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 by Allison Byers
Jens Hoffmann, when he was director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, took a sizable gamble by commissioning 12 acclaimed photographers, including Larry Clark, Katy Grannan, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore and Alec Soth, to document the mood of the nation in 2011. The roll-of-the-dice idea was to pair the unpredictable images from this group with the well-known photographs that Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott and others produced for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s.