|
AKIKO TOBU : The Hotel Upstairs: The Lives of a San Franciso Residential Hotel DETAILS: Akiko Tobu DESCRIPTION: More than 23,000 people live in some 520 residential hotels in the city of San Francisco. These hotels are the refuge of poets, students, laborers, technicians ñ people who hope to move up and out, and people who just hope, planning endlessly and staying for decades. Akiko Tobu spent a year creating these bright, intimate portraits of the rooms and residents of Columbus Hotel in North Beach. In these small rooms people study, hide, paint, plan, and write in the generous afternoon sun. Tobu visits them all, those just starting out in life-dreaming of a home where they can plug in microwaves and toasters, to a whole family trying to squeeze a home into a room, to decade-long residents whose rooms are settled and crusted with the accumulations of living. "The Hotel Upstairs" is full of the rich, difficult, dirty, and beautiful, variety of life ñ a San Francisco rarely pictured with such tenderness. Akiko Tobu's works have been widely exhibited in Japan. In 2004 she was awarded the 20th Higashikawa New Photographer Prize. |
