Henrik Kam

Abandoned Spaces features recent photographs of Danish-born photographer, Henrik Kam. Kam, who has lived in the U.S. for over thirty years, has been documenting the San Francisco waterfront area since the mid-nineties, presents The SF Bayfront Interiors, a series of photographs that are part of a larger documentary project known as The San Francisco Bayfront (1996–2002). Through this extensive body of work, the artist examines decaying warehouses and decommissioned shipyards.

SF Bayfront Interiors exposes the fallow interior spaces that were once laboratories for toxic research performed by the U.S. Navy during the Cold War and the Vietnam War. Kam’s images capture the natural light still flowing into the empty rooms painted in luminous colors, abandoned in various states of disarray. His highly detailed prints depict the benign beauty of modern architectural spaces in a disturbingly real industrial wasteland.

“Decades of careless handling and disposal of heavy metals and low-level radioactive materials has left behind a legacy requiring a multimillion-dollar cleanup effort at one of the largest Superfund Sites in the country, adjacent to one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

I see myself as an ‘urban/industrial archeologist’ unearthing visual clues and indexing the evidence of an industrialism which built the West and armed an empire.” – Henrik Kam