Photo: Kathy Sloane with her camera. Photo courtesy of Ayisha Knight-Shaw.
“To tell you that I fell in love with the Koshland Awards program… is to tell you that with all the clients I have, and all the community photography I do… this gave me a renewed sense of hope for community building,” wrote Kathy Sloane in a letter to Koshland Director Retha Robinson in 2000. A talented self-taught photographer, Sloane was known for her photographs documenting music in the Bay Area. Perhaps less well known but equally evocative of the best of humanity are the photographs she took over more than 20 years for the San Francisco Foundation’s Koshland Program.
The Faces of Community
Sloane met Arnold Perkins, then director of the Koshland Program, in the 1980s because their children attended the same preschool in Berkeley. Sloane and Perkins became friends, and he soon hired her in to photograph program events.
Founded in 1982, SFF’s Koshland Program empowers local leaders in the Bay Area to address problems in their communities with funding and professional opportunities. It was a perfect match for Sloane, who was fascinated by the communities that make up the Bay Area and had been documenting its “multicultural and multiethnic richness,” as she described on her website, since the 1970s.
Over the years, she photographed Koshland events and, with great talent and care, Koshland Fellows in the critical roles they served in their neighborhoods. Her photos are beautiful and engaging, and they capture the leadership, dedication, deep roots, and joy that each fellow brought to their community.
Staying in Focus
The collection of Koshland photographs consists of hundreds of expressive, resonant images that Sloane, who died in 2024, adeptly captured over her decades-long partnership with SFF. The photos not only tell visual stories of Koshland projects and neighborhoods but also provide a snapshot of how SFF—a community foundation—has worked hand in hand with grassroots leaders throughout the Bay Area for decades.
Sloane’s “self-assigned task,” as she wrote on her website, was to “understand and depict the myriad ways various communities, often voiceless in mainstream media, give meaning and value to all of our lives.” It makes sense, therefore, that SFF—with our North Star of addressing the underlying causes of economic and racial inequity in the Bay Area—was one of the focuses of her photography. It was our honor to have our work captured by an artist with such deep roots in this place we call home.