The Persistent Image

Pamela Gentile | April 5 – May 31, 2017

The Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco is excited to present its upcoming exhibition, The Persistent Image, featuring photographs by San Francisco photographer Pamela Gentile. Photographed over a span of thirty-plus years, the exhibition uncovers an intimate portrait of cinema made in near darkness during screenings of the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Gentile, who herself carries a deep appreciation for cinema, began photographing the festival as a film student in 1985. She and a boyfriend were able to gain press access to complete an assignment. He wrote the story and she photographed. With this access she both could attend one of the biggest film events in the world and come face to face with directors, producers, writers and actors. After presenting the work she made to the festival organizers, she was invited back to visit the next year as the official staff photographer. She has photographed every festival since, creating an incredible archive of the festival’s events and invited guests. With each passing year, Gentile made sure to pull aside each of the directors and actors to make portraits that differ from normal celebrity shots. This impressed the festival organizers, and they would often offer her studio space in each theatre. The artists she photographed include Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee, Francis Ford Coppola, Mira Nair, Werner Herzog, Barry Jenkins, Robin Williams, Jackie Chan, Anjelica Houston, Ellen Page and Zooey Deschanel, among many others.

The exhibition, which will run between April 6 - May 31, 2017, will take you on a remarkable behind the scenes tour of the longest running film festival in the Americas, now entering its 60th year, and introduce you to some of cinema’s greatest along the way. Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, April 6, 2017 between 6pm and 8pm.

About the Artist

Pamela Gentile likes to work in the dark.

The first film she ever processed was 16 mm, meant for movies, her first love and the profession she trained for. She found she always shot stills on everyone else’s movies though.

Shooting the local music scene in San Francisco she got an assignment to go on tour with Chris Isaak where she focused on story. Her interest in stories brought her to SF Weekly where as photojournalist and photo editor she shot photo stories for ten years processing her own film and making prints in her darkroom.

Gentile kept her focus on her first love, the world of cinema.

Her archive is now thirty plus. Her subject matter, backstage, on stage, the red carpet, the marquee, the audience, screenings, and odd moments in between, is captured cinematically in an atmospheric visual narrative. Her portraits of filmmakers, actors and musicians shot simply and candidly, often in a makeshift backstage studio, form a historical record of influential figures in World Cinema. Her most recent capture of screens preserves movies in movie theaters which is fast becoming an endangered species.

The Persistent Image

As a former film studies major, Gentile brings an insider’s eye to her ongoing documentation of the SFIFF. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Gentile has built an extensive photographic archive of the film industry, documenting its festivals and faces with a distinct and informed style. Her close relationship with the subject and passion for the cinema reveals itself in photographs that embrace an aesthetic informed by the industry itself: “I wanted to photograph the festival in the way that I saw cinema,” Gentile explains. Working quickly in low light conditions with a handheld camera, Gentile moves through the crowd, rendering the event and its participants in a graphic style that visually blurs the line between the festival at hand and the cinema it celebrates.

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