Talk to just about anyone in the queer community in San Francisco, and they know Rink, at least by reputation. Go to any queer demonstration, street fair, bar event, film screening or protest march, be it early in the morning or late at night, and Rink's there, his face hidden behind a camera, crouched down to get the best shot. Rink is a photo-journalist, but as with other photojournalists like Frank Capra, Dorothy Miller and the great Henri Cartier Bresson, the prosaic term “journalism” doesn't do full justice to the work. In this exhibition of but a tiny percentage of Rink's nearly half a million images, you can assess his photographic eye for yourself. Like Cartier Bresson, Rink seems to have a gift for being there at the right moment, not only to catch the action, but also to catch the image that is rich enough, dense enough, strange enough, to tell, like all great photos, a complex story without words.

Rink's first celebration of his birthday in his adopted city of San Francisco took place on June 27th, 1969—and was interrupted by a phone call from a friend in Greenwich Village relating the Stonewall riots in real time. After getting caught up in the then-nascent LGBT political movement, Rink turned his focus to the rich fabric of queer social and political life, chronicling San Francisco's seismic self-transformation into the queerest city in the world in the space of a decade. The great historical value of Rink's work is the nearly day by day chronicling of that process of transformation, the gradual and occasionally violent birthing of the San Francisco we know today.

Rink held fundraisers for Harvey Milk's earliest campaigns, and his very first public exhibition took place in 1974 in the large plate glass windows of Milk's camera store at 575 Castro St. The subject was a series of images, some of which we're showing, of the 1974 Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. That storefront exhibition was the very first mirror of the newly queer Castro. Fittingly, we here return the favor, offering space for the first New York showing of some of Harvey Milk's photographs in the context of presenting Rink's work.

These are portraits of a very particular time and a very particular place. But watch how they move effortlessly from the particular to the general, transforming into epics on universal themes like justice, love, equality, sexual desire, and aspirations for the future. Rink's great subject has always been the slow, difficult building of a better world, one, in which, if we're not yet able to live that betterment, we can at least see it fleetingly figured-a quiet utopianism populating the image of the everyday.

— Jonathan David Katz