Marfa Prada Photograph

Pioneering urban artist/photographer James Stark acquired a love for the gritty street approach to photography while living in New York City in the late 1960s He was one of the artists instrumental in the forming of the punk rock scene in San Francisco. Utilizing his photographic and graphic art skills James designed posters and shot photos of bands and people who populated the San Francisco scene. In 1992 he published "Punk77 as inside look at the san francisco rock n' roll scene, 1977" a history of the early days of the San Francisco Punk scene. His photos were published in New York Rocker, Search and Destroy and Slash, among others. Several of his photographs and posters later were published in "Hardcore California", Street Art", "Art Rock" and "Fucked up and Photocopied." His posters for the band Crime have become classics and highly prized collectors items. After the punk scene lost its terror and was taken over by the suburban crowd James moved on to other pursuits; motorcycles, painting and a continued exploration of photography. In the late eighties he became interested in industrial/city/urban landscapes. He started the Urban Art project working the alleys and out of the way corners of San Francisco's SOMA district documenting the area in black and white. Shooting when there was still a sense of danger that existed there before gentrification took over. When the Loma Pretia earthquake of 1989 hit the work became more meaningful. The earthquake had damaged a lot of the old building which created opportunities for real estate developers to come in with their urban renewal projects destroying what character was left in that part of San Francisco. Upon finishing the gathering part of the project he decided to transform some of the photographs from black and white to color. Previously he had experimented with altering the color of b&w photographs when he was doing rock and roll band posters for the CW Saloon. This involved using Photoshop and ink jet printers. He used color to invoke a sense of gritty urban confrontation, the idea that a person was not seeing some pretty pictures but a feeling of being in another world, surreal if you will. This lead to him entering some of the images in the 2000 MacWorld Expo Digital Art contest and his digital work was one of 25, out of over 900 entries, to be exhibited in the MacWorld Expo Digital Art Gallery.