State of Mind: A California Invitational

State of Mind: A California Invitational is a celebration of California photography in the 21st century.

Twenty-one California photographers will be exhibited including Mona Kuhn, Todd Hido, Michael Light, Susan Rankaitis, Ken Gonzales-Day and Uta Barth. Their subject matter varies from scientific inquiry into the mechanics of light on the retina, to re-interpreting historical documents, to views of California’s beautiful and troubled topography, using techniques ranging from wet-collodion to film-based and digital imagery, or combinations of each.

In creating the Invitational, MoPA invited forty California-based curators, writers, gallery owners, and publishers to nominate photographers of note. MoPA juried the exhibition from this collective. While regional by way of where these photographers live, the issues within the photographs from State of Mind are global. They address what photographers from Berlin to Beijing are currently thinking about, among them: how photography continually re-invents itself, and how well it can describe the imaginary or reveal the invisible.