The Bob Mizer Museum and Photographic Archives presents Analog Human Studies: 25 Years of Photography by Slava Mogutin, an exhibition that foregrounds intimacy, presence, and lived experience as a form of visual record. Working primarily with analog cameras, Mogutin photographs friends, lovers, and collaborators from within his own social world, producing images shaped by trust rather than performance.
Born in Russia and forced into exile in the 1990s after persecution for his writing and queer activism, Mogutin approaches photography as an ethical act of witness. His images resist spectacle and polish, instead accumulating meaning through proximity, repetition, and time. Bodies appear unguarded and specific, marked by tenderness, fatigue, desire, and care—never anonymous, never staged.
Analog Human Studies situates Mogutin’s work within a broader documentary tradition while rejecting claims of neutrality or distance. These photographs function as human documents: records made in real time, under real conditions, by someone fully implicated in what he photographs. Together, they form a quiet but insistent archive of visibility, affirming photography’s capacity to preserve lives that exist outside official narratives.
Analog Human Studies: 25 Years of Photography by Slava Mogutin
April 2 – June 13, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 2, 2026, 6-8:30 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, April 10, 7-8:30 PM
Gay Propaganda 3.0 Screening: Friday, May 15, 7-8:30 PM
The Bob Mizer Museum and Photographic Archives
920 Larkin Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
https://bobmizer.org/
