Appreciation: Richard Avedon and Robert Frank at SFMOMA

Every time I'm in San Francisco I go several blocks down the street from the Hotel Rex, where I stay, and see what might be showing at SFMOMA.

This time, I got very lucky, for entire wings had been given over to both Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, photographers whose work has so very much to teach. The Frank exhibition presented, among other things, 83 photographs taken in America during 1955 and 1956—a time of diners, jukeboxes, intense racism, Hollywood, iconic barber shops, and road trips. It's not just the photographs that make this show. It's their heartrending juxtapositions. I'm writing a novel that takes place during this time—or I will be, months from now, when other work settles—and every pulse beat of every photograph mattered hugely to me.

The Avedon retrospective is one of a kind—SFMOMA will be its only host—and features more than 200 seminal portraits of faces wholly alive. A dancer, blurred. Dylan in the street. Janis Joplin inside a fury of hair. Marilyn Monroe with all her beauty still intact. I'd long been an Avedon fan. I'd never stood before his photos, hung, the faces so much larger than they'd ever be in life.

I had my camera with me; I expected someone at the door to take it. But no one did, and when I asked whether photos could be taken at the show, I was given an easy nod. At first it seemed wrong to photograph the photographs. Then I realized that that wasn't the subject at all. The subject was appreciation.