Two photographers, one room, and a lot of ideas.
Westeigh
Co-Founder & Chief Visionary Instigator
"I'm interested in what happens when someone slows down long enough to really look at a photograph. Sometimes the image changes. Sometimes the person does."
Westeigh is a self-taught Bay Area photographer whose practice is rooted in restraint, the deliberate act of leaving space for the viewer to enter the image. Working across film and digital formats, including medium and large format, she is drawn to processes that encourage careful and unhurried observation. Her photographs frequently linger at the edges of scenes, in reflections, fog, shadows, and partial views, where the frame reveals only part of the story. Her work considers how photographs shape perception, not only through what they show, but through what the frame chooses to leave out. She works within a tradition of photographers who understood that silence in an image is not absence. It is the whole point.
Her background is in molecular biology, studied at San Francisco State University, and that scientific training informs the way she sees. There is a researcher’s patience in her process: methodical, attentive, drawn to the hidden structures that shape a scene. The camera simply became a different kind of microscope, allowing her to investigate perception rather than cells.
Her work was selected for the de Young Open 2023 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Achenbach Graphic Arts Council (AGAC), a works-on-paper curatorial group supporting the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), which includes the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor. She also serves as Program Committee Chair for AGAC, where she helps develop and coordinate programming focused on prints, photographs, and works on paper in support the broader curatorial mission.
Still observing. When not photographing, she is usually reading, writing about photography and collecting, or wondering thrift stores in search of obscure cameras. Tends to have a million ideas at once, is thinking three exhibitions ahead, and starting projects she probably shouldn't have started yet.
Jeff
Co-Founder & CHIEF LOGISTICAL MAGICIAN
"The best conversations about photography don't happen at openings. They happen on a quiet Saturday when someone walks in, looks longer than they expected to, and suddenly wants to talk about what they're seeing."
Jeff is a San Francisco native and photographer whose classic training gives his work a storytelling quality that leaves room for the viewer to form their own narrative. He shoots film and digital, including medium format, and has never lost the darkroom instincts he learned early.
In high school, he studied under Ralph Rappaport, an associate of Ansel Adams, learning the Zone System and advanced darkroom techniques on trips to Yosemite, Carmel, and Point Lobos. Rappaport introduced him to Ruth Bernhard, who invited Jeff into her home for a private critique — a meeting with one of the most definitive photographers of the twentieth century that shaped his work from that point forward.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art Photography from San Francisco State University, where he studied under Don Worth, Jack Welpott, Catherine Wagner, and Melanie Walker. Before opening Frame 1A, Jeff served with the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations in Cambodia, former Yugoslavia, Angola, and Rwanda. He's taught photography and led workshops throughout the Bay Area.
His work has been widely published and exhibited, and was selected for the de Young Open 2023 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
Logistical genius. Listens to a million ideas and knows exactly which ones to build first. Usually organizing something, pulling off the impossible, or quietly making sure everything runs. He is also very good at gently steering things back to earth when ideas start orbiting.
Together, we run the room.
One of us is an introverted extrovert. The other an extroverted introvert. We tag team conversations the way photographers swap lenses — one stepping in when the other needs a moment.
It works.
Frame 1A was never about us. It's about the photographers who walk through the door. But the space reflects our shared belief that photography deserves time, attention, and curiosity.