Degrees of Separation illustrates a touchstone among photographers—the fragile nature of our connection to other human beings and to the world around us. Drawn from the permanent collection and featuring several key new acquisitions, the story unfolds through images ranging from portraits to landscapes, grainy vintage snapshots to large-scale digtital photographs. One highlight of the exhibition is Los Angeles – based photographer Catherine Opie's Melissa & Lake, Durham, North Carolina (1998), one of a series Opie created in the 1990s when driving cross-country. The image offers a moment of pride and intimacy, a brief glimpse into a female couple's domestic life. Melissa & Lake shares gallery space with an installation of vintage and contemporary photographs from the "Pictures from Home" series by Larry Sultan. Sultan's searching images of his retired parents in their suburban American setting question middle-class values, while old snapshots touch upon the dreams that his parents had as a young couple. This exhibition also includes works by Anthony Aziz, Chris Jordan, Laurie Long, Sebastiao Salgado, AmyStein, and Katherine Westerhout.

Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe

Newly added to the exhibition are never-before-seen photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe, whom SJMA invited to undertake a photo project in San Jose’s historical Japantown. Watanabe, who lives in Los Angeles and Tokyo, made several trips to San Jose, during which he visited with community members and became fascinated by the artifacts in the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. This resulting suite of nineteen photographs of objects made by Japanese-Americans living in internment camps during World War II reflects the poignancy and the power of human endurance.