Michael Jang

Michael Jang Synopsis

San Francisco based photographer Michael Jang spent nearly four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer. Unbeknownst to the world, however, he was simultaneously assembling a vast archive of thousands of remarkable images documenting, variously: college days, Hollywood celebrities, would-be weather-presenters, San Francisco street scenes, his family, Bay Area punks and adolescent garage bands. Jang revealed nothing of his ever-expanding, eclectic archive for almost 40 years until 2003, when he submitted a number of images for consideration to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. Jang's work attracted immediate acclaim, and for the past decade he has continued to unveil his considerable oeuvre in national and international exhibitions and monographs.
The photographer's first major monograph, Who Is Michael Jang? highlights the photographer's most important bodies of work. Introduced by Jang's longtime collaborator and SFMoMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra Phillips, this volume offers readers a long-overdue introduction to Jang's incredible images.Michael Jang (born 1951) has practiced photography in San Francisco for more than 50 years. Expanding the medium's perceived parameters from the very outset of his engagement, Jang's eclectic images, many of which were authored throughout America's photographic golden age, have more recently drawn broad renown. After decades of successful commercial portraiture, Jang began to revisit the vast archive of unseen, spontaneous images he has amassed, many of which betray the influence of celebrated street photographers such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model.