Can this treasured S.F. photography institution cheat death again?

Hal Fischer says he’s twice rescued SF Camerawork, the nonprofit gallery that has supported the work of experimental photographers for more than 50 years, and he’s ready to do it again. 

After Camerawork’s board announced last Monday that the gallery would close this month, Fischer sent a proposal to the board, indicating that he had formed a “working group” that would help sustain the nonprofit and “secure funding for three months.”

As of last week, the directors were “100 percent open to all possibilities,” and were weighing their options, according to publicist Wendy Norris, who was acting as the board’s spokesperson. It’s unclear how likely Fischer’s plan will work. 

In an email to Mission Local, Camerawork board president Stephanie Cochinos said that the decision to close was due to “rising costs and a shifting funding landscape,” and was “one of the most difficult decisions our Board has faced.” 

Although tax filings show that, starting in 2022, Camerawork failed, three years in a row, to cover expenses with the revenue it took in, it steadied itself in the fiscal year that ended in July 2025, reporting a net income of  $57,000 with net assets — money in the bank, in its case — of $127,000. But to get there, it cut its already small staff down to one full-time employee. 

Moreover, its lease at Fort Mason became a big expense in 2022 — $119,000 that year — and one that was fairly fixed, at 60 percent more than what it had been paying in earlier years. 

It’s unclear what happened in the last year, but Cochinos wrote that the board “could not chart a sustainable path forward.” If it is dissolved, any remaining assets must be handed over to a nonprofit that does similar work. 

Citing the gallery’s apparent stability, Fischer was surprised when word came of the closure, and rejected that it was inevitable. 

He should know: In the gallery’s early years, Fischer appointed a makeshift board of directors (“I asked them each to give $100, which in 1977 for these people was a lot”), and drove to Sacramento to formally incorporate what was then a burgeoning, if somewhat unstable, collective of experimental photographers into a nonprofit. 

Decades later, in 2010, he stepped in as interim executive director to help see Camerawork through the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

So, this week, he resolved to go for a hat trick and save it again. 

Museums and nonprofit cultural centers are in precarious positions, and the 2024 announcement of the closure of California College of the Arts marked the loss of Northern California’s last nonprofit art school. But Fischer, who currently holds no official role at Camerawork, believes a permanent closure is avoidable.

Plus, Camerawork has weathered other rough times in the past, including a period during the dot-com boom when the nonprofit, then based in SoMa, saw its annual rent rise from $30,000 to $200,000 (that time, then-director Marnie Gillet was at the helm and the nonprofit moved).

Over the years, Camerawork has occupied some half-dozen locations, including the second floor of a building at 1011 Market St., which still bears the nonprofit’s name.

Fischer said several other Camerawork supporters, including former Camerawork director Sharon Tenenbaum, have signed on to the effort to save the nonprofit, and to put up necessary funds to stabilize the organization in the meantime. 

“A number of people have reached out who are upset, who want to help,” Fischer said. “People are coming out of the woodwork.”

In its early years, Camerawork filled a niche in the local arts scene by showing the work of openly queer and often controversial artists, and has since played a significant role in promoting photography as an art form and supporting local fine art photographers.

Around the same time that Fischer helped incorporate Camerawork as a nonprofit, he exhibited the first photos of his “Gay Semiotics” series, which evolved out of the ideas of an early Camerawork group show called “Photography and Language.” 

That 1976 show lent its name to a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which featured Fischer and his Camerawork contemporaries like Lew Thomas and Donna-Lee Phillips.

Camerawork also has a vast archive of photographs, print matter and artist communications dating back to the 1970s, which serves as a record of the last half-century of Bay Area photography. 

Should Camerawork shutter, the board would work to ensure its archives are preserved and moved into an institutional collection that can continue to maintain them.

Photographer Chris McCaw, who worked at Camerawork from 1994 to 2008, wrote in an email that helping photographers install their shows at the gallery and going out for drinks with them afterward was “my version of a master’s degree.”

That education came full circle in May, when an exhibition of McCaw’s “Sunburn” photographs — in which the sun literally burnt holes in light-sensitive paper, tracing its arc across the sky — showed at the gallery through last month. 

Barring a resuscitation — by Fischer or otherwise — the final Camerawork show will have been John Chiara’s “Bay Panel,” which featured large-format prints of San Francisco Bay and the shimmers of sunlight reflected on it, created inside Chiara’s colossal hand-built cameras.

Chiara’s show closed Sunday, Aug. 16. While Camerawork’s future is now uncertain, Fischer feels confident. It’s cheated death before; it could do so again.

“That’s the history of Camerawork,” he said. “New chapters.”