After more than 50 years anchoring the Bay Area’s contemporary photography scene, SF Camerawork is shuttering its doors. 

The nonprofit art gallery’s final day at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture will be Sunday, Aug. 16, its board announced Monday, Aug. 10. 

“This decision follows years of rising operating costs, declining public funding, and a changing philanthropic landscape,” the board said in a statement on the organization’s website. “SF Camerawork is not alone in facing these pressures; arts organizations across the country are confronting similar challenges.”  

Since its founding in 1974, SF Camerawork has aimed to showcase contemporary and experimental work, especially that of newer photographers. The organization also hosts artist lectures, workshops and gallery tours.

Over the years, SF Camerawork has displayed work by influential photographers such as Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas and Joel-Peter Witkin, and helped launch the careers of emerging artists.   

The gallery’s final exhibition, “John Chiara: Bay Panel,” features a 24-foot-long city skyline composed of six frames by the San Francisco photographer. The solo show is presented in collaboration with the contemporary Haines Gallery located in the same building. 

Discovering SF Camerawork, along with other local galleries, helped engage and inspire Chiara when he was younger, he said in an Instagram video posted last month ahead of his artist talk and camera demonstration on July 18. 

“It’s gritty,” Chiara said. “It’s a gritty nonprofit, and it should be respected for that and for what it offers to San Francisco, to the photographers. It’s really important to the photography community of San Francisco to have SF Cameraworks.”

The nonprofit has relocated several times since it was founded in Fairfax five decades ago, including its latest move to the Fort Mason Center in 2022. 

Now it mirrors the recent demise of numerous Bay Area arts organizations and galleries, from the nonprofit California College of the Arts’ impending shutdown to the Altman Siegel gallery’s closure in October 2025. 

“To photographers, those who have devoted their lives to the medium and those just beginning, keep creating,” the SF Camerawork board said. “The dialogue that has shaped this community will endure through your vision, your collaborations, and the work yet to come.”