As a nationally recognized youth photography and mentoring program, First Exposures strives to make a long-term impact on the lives of high-need, underserved youth in the San Francisco Bay Area.
First Exposures provides youth aged 11-18 the opportunity to engage with photography in a classroom with guidance from a photographer who serves as both a mentor and a positive adult role model. Many of our students have experienced difficult life circumstances and are in the process of stabilizing their lives. Photography is the catalyst by which our students acquire vital life skills and the vehicle through which we deepen their intellectual, academic, and developmental experiences. While learning to photograph, students are also enhancing their self-confidence, developing their personal vision, and cultivating their passion for learning. Since the program's founding in 1993, over 95% of our students have gone on to pursue a college education. We reinforce our class time with time spent in experiential learning environments: visits to local newspapers, major museums, alternative art spaces, commercial photography studios, etc. And each semester we also go on a field trip to locations like Angel Island, Pie Ranch in Pescadero, the Solano Land Trust, and Bay Area beaches. The students use their cameras to explore and interpret these places, as well as with sites and people closer to home.
We meet at RayKo Photo Center (a community darkroom) and in our SOMA home - right next to Adolph Gasser at 2nd and Howard. First Exposures classes are located conveniently near BART and many bus lines.
Academic Year Mentorship Program Since 1993 each First Exposures student is matched one-to-one with a photographer who provides individualized guidance and serves as a volunteer mentor and positive adult role model. Photography is the catalyst by which our students acquire vital life skills and it is the vehicle through which we deepen their intellectual, academic and developmental experiences. Classes are offered in both traditional and digital photography.
Summer Group Mentoring Program In the summer of 2014 we introduced our first group-mentoring program offering our services for 30 youth. In comparison to our academic year program, this class operates in small group settings with two mentors and five mentees acting as a team to provide a unique shared experience and more peer-to-peer learning. Using state-of-the-art digital SLR cameras we provide a very similar experience to our regular program in an intensive eight weeks.
Anastasia Samoylova: Atlantic Coast opens a vast, quietly unsettling portrait of the American East Coast — one in which nostalgia, dislocation and transformation are sewn into the landscape itself. In this new monograph, Samoylova retraces the route pioneered by Berenice Abbott in 1954, journeying from Florida to Maine to revisit the places Abbott once documented, and to observe what has become of them decades later. Her images — in vivid color and stark black and white — reveal the tension between myth and reality, between promises of progress and the traces of decay or displacement.
Where once small towns and coastal communities had a certain stillness, Samoylova finds change carved into facades and roadside signs, into suburban sprawl and shuttered shopfronts. She frames these scenes with a photographer’s patience and a poet’s sensitivity — capturing abandoned diners, empty motels, decaying houses, ghostly intersections. At the same time, there is stubborn life: occasional portraits of people, wildlife, reminders that behind every sign of decline, someone, something endures.
Her book does not simply document physical places. It traces the shifting contours of identity, belonging and memory in a nation where the open road has long symbolized freedom — and where that ideal has become tangled with consumerism, environmental degradation, and socio-economic upheaval. Through Atlantic Coast, Samoylova asks whether the “American Dream” remains intact, or if it has fractured along with the towns her car passes through.
Reading this volume is to experience a slow, attentive journey — as a witness, as a traveller, as someone invited to reconsider what America has become. Her photographs linger, subtly unsettling the viewer’s assumptions about beauty, progress and decline. In its silence and restraint, the book whispers that memory, identity and place are fragile — and that every road carries stories worth listening to.
Coreen Simpson: A Monograph is the first major book dedicated to the influential photographer and jewelry designer whose career spans more than fifty years. As the second volume in the Vision & Justice Book Series—a groundbreaking initiative created by Dr. Sarah Lewis and coedited with Drs. Leigh Raiford and Deborah Willis—the monograph celebrates Simpson’s enduring impact on visual culture.
Simpson began her career as a journalist before turning to photography, capturing the richness of Black life, fashion, and identity. Her portraits of icons such as Grace Jones, Muhammad Ali, and Toni Morrison, as well as her iconic B-Boys series from the 1980s, showcase her eye for style, pride, and self-expression. The book also features her later work with collage and overpainting, alongside the story of her celebrated jewelry line, including the iconic Black Cameo worn by Rosa Parks and Rihanna.
Featuring original essays by leading voices such as Bridget R. Cooks, Rujeko Hockley, Awol Erizku, and Doreen St. Félix, as well as an in-depth interview by Deborah Willis, Coreen Simpson: A Monograph offers a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose work continues to shape the worlds of photography, fashion, and Black cultural history.
Explore the groundbreaking early work of Daido Moriyama, one of Japan’s most radical photographers, with this collectible, slipcased photobook.
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) is one of Japan’s most renowned and prolific photographers. His diverse projects often focus on urban landscapes, exploring light and shadow, and form and abstraction. Using a handheld camera and high-contrast black-and-white film, Moriyama captures Tokyo’s chaotic streets and clandestine underbelly, revealing the darkness and strangeness beneath the surface.
Daido Moriyama: Quartet is a vital anthology of the four seminal photobooks that form the foundation of Moriyama’s career as a photographer: Japan: A Photo Theater, A Hunter, Farewell Photography, and Light and Shadow. Spanning the fifteen years during which he honed his techniques and unveiled his distinctive vision, these photobooks were originally released as limited editions in Japan and represent some of the most daring ventures in photographic publishing history. Edited by Mark Holborn, this compilation includes excerpts from Moriyama’s diaries, journals, and memoranda, offering intimate glimpses into the core of his creative process. Presented in a slipcase, this volume is essential for all Moriyama fans and anyone passionate about photography and visual culture.
An essential introduction to the complexities of visual representation, this book offers a critical new framework for understanding and practicing photojournalism in a global digital context.
Critical Photojournalism guides readers through a variety of ethical, technical and business skills, plus the mental health, self-care and safety considerations necessary to thrive in the field. Drawing on their extensive industry and teaching experience, the authors provide real-world advice on how to navigate the demands of the profession while addressing the impact that photojournalism has on society and ways that photojournalists can mitigate harm. Consideration is given to understanding and disrupting implicit bias and power structures in newsrooms, as well as issues around access, working in breaking news environments and balancing informed consent with varying media laws around the world. In accessible language, this book highlights the importance of collaboration and community engagement in contemporary photojournalism and encourages students to adopt a decolonial approach to their work. Readers will learn to balance the needs for accuracy and thoughtfulness with the priorities of a global, social-media-engaged audience.
This is a key textbook for those seeking a nuanced introduction to visual journalism and/or a fresh approach to their craft. This book is supported by a website which can be accessed at www.criticalphotojournalism.com. The website includes a full-length bonus chapter on video and photojournalism, interviews with professional visual journalists, further tips and tools, and a glossary of key terms.
