Jona Frank -  "Learning to Fly"

Gallery 169 is pleased to host an exhibition of photographs by Jona Frank. Jona Frank is a photographer based in Santa Monica.  Her work is in many private and corporate collections, as well as museums including the Getty Museum, SF MOMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her photographs have appeared in print and online in such media as Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Mother Jones. 

Her acclaimed first book, High School (Arenas Street, September 2004), explores the hierarchy of public high schools  across the United States. RIGHT, her second book, was the basis for In the Paths of Righteousness, an exhibition at the California Museum of Photography. In 2011, Frank’s work was selected by curators at the International Center of Photography to represent the United States at the Lianzhou Photography Festival in China. Frank is currently at work on her third book about youth from a suburban town in Northern England. 

Learning to Fly is about boyhood. And, California. It’s about it all going too fast and the tedium of when it feels slow. It’s about wanting to hold on to the ephemeral now and the strange altering of a haircut to make you see that it’s all going by. And how the only choice to really make is to be in it, to engage, and encourage flight.