Stephen Albair: Private Views, Hidden Reflections at The Dryansky

The Private Views, Hidden Reflections, is a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based narrative photographer Stephen Albair. Albair, born in 1942, is a long-time resident of San Francisco and an internationally exhibiting artist. Private Views, Hidden Reflections will mark Albair’s first solo exhibition in San Francisco in ten years, featuring a selection of his works from the last decade that present complex and provocative scenes incorporating an astute sense of wit.

In what can be called a variation on tableau or narrative photography because of the emphasis of mise en scène, Albair goes through a creative process—often drawing from autobiographical sources—resulting in imagery that stirs up memory, nostalgia, irony and the enduring trilogy of human emotions: love, loss and longing.

Albair captures carefully assembled scenes with a simple 1970 Nikon 35-mm camera in the midday light of his living room window. This room, which doubles as a studio, serves as the center for Albair’s creative practice where the construction of signature sets or stages are made. It typically takes about 1–3 months to produce a single image, with the majority of the time spent building the intricate, elaborate scenes, before they are photographed on film. The scene is then broken down to make room for the next tableau.

While semi-autobiographical in nature, echoing the artist’s challenges, successes and failures within life’s ambiguities, the works in Private Views, Hidden Reflections cut across cultural and generational boundaries. Albair’s found objects are like words in a poem, charged with innocence and grace. Despite the seeming simplicity of his tools, methodology and execution, Albair’s unique mise en scène of found objects proves itself to be a most compelling method to communicate the deepest realms of human emotion and experience.