RayKo Photo Center, one of a kind, could be none of a...

Developing extra-large prints of tree rings at RayKo Photo Center, artist Klea McKenna is racing a late January deadline for an art fair in San Francisco. She also has a March deadline for a museum show in Carmel.

But the biggest deadline she is facing comes in April when RayKo, a one-of-a-kind art gallery, rental studio, bookstore and museum of the camera, may become none of a kind.

RayKo proprietor Stuart Kogod has put the business up for sale after 26 years. If a minimum bid of $200,000 does not appear, he plans an April 30 closing of the facility that is claimed to be the largest public photographic community center in the West and maybe the country. This would shut out any number of working documentary and fine art photographers.

“If RayKo closes it will be devastating for my art practice,” says McKenna, who pays an hourly fee for access to both the private color darkroom and the black-and-white mural room for making prints 6 feet tall.

“I’ve considered leaving San Francisco, and one of the reasons I haven’t is because I have access to this,” says McKenna, 36. “In the last decade, the West Coast has come to be known for material experimentation. I believe that is largely because RayKo is here.”

In an email sent to RayKo’s mailing list of 12,000 photography enthusiasts, Kogod announced: “The operation simply isn’t generating enough income.” He is seeking another benefactor to take his place, and has suggested that it may be better off as a nonprofit.

He is also considering turning RayKo into a cooperative to be owned by some combination of employees and the photo community at large.

“I can’t keep propping it up myself, rather it should stand on its own,” Kogod said in a separate email sent to The Chronicle after a request for comment.

Unlike most arts upheaval in San Francisco, RayKo’s jeopardy is not due to eviction or a rent spike because Kogod also owns the building, a 12,000-square-foot, century-old brick shoe box on Third Street.

The building could be for sale or rent with the business, which includes workshops, classes, digital printing services, both group and private darkrooms, and most prominently the hallway gallery, which is 1,600 square feet.

Gallery Director Ann Jastrab rotates work monthly in what is considered one of the most clever and original exhibition schedules in the Bay Area. This is made evident by the show that may close the place, the 10th Annual International Juried Plastic Camera Show.

“We do a lot of shows to keep film- and darkroom-based processes alive,” says Jastrab.

RayKo hosted the final show of Kodachrome, before the last processing lab closed, in 2010. RayKo has had pinhole photography shows, and shows of quirky documentary projects like Wisconsin Country Tavern League interiors.

Most recently, it hosted an exhibition of 30 vintage Cibachrome prints shot at night by the late Steve Harper, along with members of the San Francisco Nocturnes.

The gallery is open until 10 most nights with couches in front where photographers and viewers are welcome to hang out until the cold gets to them, as the building is unheated.

With its brick exterior painted white with black trim and lettering to evoke an old picture, RayKo is a gritty counterweight to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, just two blocks away. Sandy Phillips, who built the photography program at SFMOMA before retiring as senior curator last year, is among RayKo’s biggest fans.

“It has consistently supported the community of photography in the Bay Area with a fine and ambitious exhibition program and a wonderfully catholic program to support the teaching and making of photographs, including old technologies,” says Phillips. “We would miss it deeply in this community.”

RayKo opened in 1991 as a for-profit business named for Man Ray, and Kogod, a trust funder, arts benefactor, philanthropist and camera tinkerer.

The first location on Polk Street was a small storefront gallery with darkroom for rent. After an interim move, it landed in a seemingly permanent home in 2004, when Kogod bought and renovated a warehouse that had once been an auto brake repair center, next to the elevated stretch of Interstate 80.

There is all the space needed for Kogod to display his collection, which includes a working photo booth from 1938, and all forms of heavy metal film cameras in display cases. RayKo sells self-published monographs that museum stores won’t carry, bins of prints priced at $20 to $450, a ceiling set by Kogod to keep it affordable.

There is a full-time staff of six, not counting Kogod, who has “never drawn a salary or a cent from it,” he says.

“I got into this because I had a deep interest in photography, didn’t want to be a commercial photographer, didn’t want to work in isolation, and I enjoy serving people, at least some people. The enterprise is meaningful to me as long as it is financially self-sustaining.”

Kogod says the darkrooms drag down profitability, as they become unneeded now that film and film cameras are fading to black. But for artists and art schools, they are still essential. The San Francisco Art Institute teaches its color printing courses there, and on weekends all 12 private darkrooms are often booked and every station in the shared darkrooms is in use.

“Almost every place in the country has gotten rid of its color darkroom,” says Jastrab. “We have artists flying in from New York and England.”

You can take a class in wet plate collodion prints from the 1850s at RayKo. You can take a class in view cameras on tripods the way Ansel Adams taught it. RayKo even has a walk-in camera obscura for watching the action on Third Street.

Kogod promises to continue running the artist-in-residence program and the First Exposures youth programs which meet on Saturday for the next two years. He is vague about what happens after that.

The plastic camera show opens March 1 and closes April 23 along with the gallery itself, if no angel investors come to the rescue. After that the prints for sale in the bins will be returned to the shooters and the darkrooms and studios will close.

“There have been a lot of closings of art spaces over the last few years and each one is tragic in its own way,” says McKenna. “What’s different about the threat of losing RayKo is that it’s not just a place to view art or for artists to come together. It’s actually the only facility where certain kinds of artists can make their art.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art