"I took this photograph in 1968, in what was then Leningrad. I was 19 years old, on a mid-winter school trip from Stockholm to the Soviet Union. It was a few months after Brezhnev had invaded Czechoslovakia, in the midst of a period of extreme repression. Fear was everywhere. As an American boy growing up under the umbrella of 1950s Western propaganda, I had always wanted to see the other side for myself. This trip introduced me to the fragility of the human condition, and opened my mind to the fundamental elegance of the un-extraordinary."

David Linger is a San Francisco artist and educator. His most recent work takes the form of thin, translucent porcelain panels, often in large-scale works composed of multiple elements. The panels contain halftone photographs in black underglaze, overprinted with intaglio embossment of original text.

Mr. Linger is a graduate of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley; he holds a master’s degree in ceramic sculpture from Mills College. He has taught at Mills College and UC Berkeley, and shows regularly in the Bay Area and across the country.

For more information on David Linger, please visit the artist's website.