Michael Jang’s California explores the artist’s career as a portrait and street photographer in California, concentrating on Jang’s early work as he was discovering the medium.

While Michael Jang has had a significant career as a professional portrait photographer, he has also been photographing people in the streets for over fifty years. As a student at California Institute of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1970s, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to capture both the idiosyncratic and the quintessential in a wide range of subjects, from his own family at home in suburbia to celebrities of the era partying at the Beverly Hilton.

Curated by Sandra S. Phillips, Michael Jang’s California is the first retrospective exhibition of the artist, assembling dozens of vintage and contemporary prints as well as notebooks and ephemera from seminal encounters over the years. This survey presents a rare journey through Jang’s career, from his early student work in the 1970s to commercial headshots of aspiring TV weather reporters in the 1980s to his series on teenage garage bands in the early 2000s. A selection of works from the McEvoy Family Collection by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand situates Jang’s work among his major influences.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Who is Michael Jang?, the first monograph of Jang’s work, is to be released by Los Angeles’ Atelier Éditions this Fall.


Michael Jang (b. 1951) is a photographer who has documented a number of groups and subcultures from all strata of society. He has earned a living as a portrait photographer, capturing iconic figures such as Jimi Hendrix, Ronald Reagan, and Robin Williams, among others. His work is featured in the collections of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown; the New York Public Library; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Who is Michael Jang? (Los Angeles: Atelier Éditions, 2019), the first monograph of Jang’s work, is to be released this Fall. Jang received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He lives and works in San Francisco.