As an integral part of the earliest signs and perhaps the end of San Francisco’s version of a realist photography movement, Jason Roberts Dobrin’s work runs parallel to and embodies the survival of film through the invention of the digital camera and subsequent near total transformation of the photograph as a film based medium to a screen based medium.  With independent publishing tactics and the camera’s importance mostly forgotten, he has recorded the atmosphere of the place and time in which this dynamic shift occurred.  The hysteria of prolonged adolescence and societal devastation is prevalent but subtle and not capitalized on, thus allowing for authenticity to remain within the resulting image and the realist perspective to take shape.  Roberts Dobrin rejects past ideas of what a good photograph is but also goes beyond that now very contemporary motif and brings to the wall a radical use of a traditional subject matter that has somewhat been abandoned by photography, but is now more powerful because of its connection to and his use of slow methods and a labor intensive process. His work dissects the American narrative through the tension of the marginalized and sheds light on the often denied aspects of our self-referential culture.

The stronghold of his practice consists of large assemblages of photographic work supplemented by drawings and objects, organized to deconstruct and re-contextualize the myths perpetuated by dominant culture. The installment of his work at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery is the culmination of a project supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission in the form of an Individual Cultural Equities grant.  Roberts Dobrin has exhibited widely in a range of print media. His interest in self-publishing has lead him to start Golden Spike Press, an ongoing collaborative publishing platform that specializes in limited-edition books and multiples, largely produced on a Risograph duplicator.