Photographer Meghann Riepenhoff makes her San Francisco debut with Littoral Drift, a gorgeous installation of cyanotypes now on view at SF Camerawork. The exhibition explores intriguing ideas of permanence (both photographic and geologic), mutability and how failure can produce the most magical outcomes. Riepenhoff lays sheets of chemically-treated paper on ocean shores -- she's worked along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts from Sausalito to South Carolina to Washington's Bainbridge Island -- and secures the pages with rocks, branches or sand, whatever's on hand. The water seeps, falls or crashes onto the paper and mixes with available sunlight to activate the photosensitive chemicals of the cyanotype. These waves are part of “littoral drift,” an ecological term that describes the movement of sand and silt along a shoreline.
