The presence of memory in our lives and the power of beauty to redeem loss are at the heart of much of David’s work.David Wolf is a visual artist devoted to hand-made darkroom photography. His practice has become increasingly process-oriented, with an emphasis on exploring photographic materials to create fresh imagery that exploits their hidden or disregarded qualities. Unifying the range of David’s work is an underlying pursuit of the interplay between happenstance and design: how the intentional and the unpredictable can come together to create something unexpectedly compelling. Embracing experimentation, discovery and accident are essential to David’s practice. The passage of time is a continual source of inspiration for David’s work; he is drawn to making images that express how change becomes visible in the physical world. The presence of memory in our lives and the power of beauty to redeem loss are at the heart of much of his work. In the Spring, 2026 David learned of two previously undetected, life-altering illnesses requiring immediate treatment. In response, he has put aside years-long, community-centered projects to pursue the multiple visual paths of healing his illness has inspired, collectively titled, The Enigma of Illness: The Certainty of Age. |
As a gallery artist at Corden|Potts, David has shown his award-winning series Nurturing Time, Life in a Backyard Garden in a solo exhibition, as well as participated in group shows throughout the gallery’s tenure. As an artist-in-residence at RayKo Photo Center, David developed his project The After Life of Things, which led to an Individual Artist’s Commission awarded by the San Francisco Arts Commission to further pursue this work, culminating in a solo show at RayKo. David’s has exhibited his work widely at such venues as Aperture, The Center for Photographic Arts, Filter Space, The Griffin Museum of Photography, Klompching Gallery, the Lishui International Photography Festival in China, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among many others. David’s photographs have been acquired by a variety of institutional and private collections, including the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris; the Prentice and Paul Sack Photographic Trust of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. His work has been published both in print and online in such publications as Harper’s, Huffington Post, FlakPhoto, Fraction Magazine, Lenscratch and Spot. A Boston native and Brown University graduate, David calls San Francisco home. PLEASE SEE DAVID’S CV FOR DETAILS. |