Kayla Bauer: Curating Nostalgia

It took me a bit to figure out and get interested in Kayla Bauer's art, particularly her San Francisco photography thesis project. I'm not usually drawn to photography, so the fact that these seemed to be just photos of San Francisco, a place that also meant seemingly little to Bauer that she chose fairly randomly felt confusing to me. After she described her process of how she approached and developed these photos into an idea for her thesis, I had an abstract concept of scattered things she seemed to be thinking about, but I still wanted to ask "What's the point?".

Delicatessen, archival pigment print,
variable dimensions, 2022

    Not until I went into the gallery and experienced the photos together did I start to feel the feeling she was describing of being nostalgic for something that doesn't exist. For Bauer, this feeling comes from not having any personal connection to SF, but feeling a sense or a presence in the storefronts and cars and places, the way they created art without realizing it. I was born in San Francisco, but my parents moved us away before I turned two. We have a lot of photos of that place during the first years of their marriage, them doing renovations on the house, the period right after I was born and my grandparents on both sides came and spent months staying with them. It was long before they got divorced, in some happy time when they were young and full of love and potential, when anything could happen and I as a baby was proof of that. When I look at these photos and hear them talk about SF, I can almost feel it, in some deep foggy recess of my mind.  

Photo of Bauer's exhibition

Looking at Bauer's photos, I feel it too. This subconscious connection that I know is there because I know I lived there, but is really hard to place because I have no conscious memory of it. In this first photo to the left, it feels like a ghost of something is lingering in the deli, the way she plays with light and the development of the photo really adds to that for me. At first, I was also hesitant about her incorporation of found photographs that she didn't take, but after seeing the one to the right here, I get it. I can feel both Bauer's connection to the "mystery girl" in the photograph, and some invisible string that ties me to my past and my history in the city. The text if you can't read it says: 

"looking through someone else's memories, someone who is gone, severing any connection to the found photograph. staring into the image, bringing life to the mystery girl. how many generations have passed between us? as I sat on the used book store's floor, digging through a bin of photographs, I found her. I have no name nor anything else, just this fleeting moment." 

I get this feeling when I look at our old photos of me and my parents in SF. I think it is both about an ennui for San Francisco as the city I was born in, but also about mourning one's loss of childhood. The gift of not remembering it is that the city exists in my mind as some idyllic place and time where we were happy. I latch onto our old family photos as little windows into this life I no longer have a hold on.

All this to say that I found Bauer's exhibit really moving in a way that I wasn't expecting! Some more photos that have these feelings to me: