My photographs are part of a project to document the architecture, landscape and people of San Francisco during the most pervasive changes the city has seen in decades. They were made with a tripod-mounted bellows camera that uses 8” x 10” sheet film, a device that cannot capture motion but renders objects in repose with great clarity.
Though deeply ingrained in the popular imagination, the San Francisco of “Vertigo” and “Bullitt,” The Joy Luck Club and The Maltese Falcon, the Beat Poets and the Summer of Love is rapidly being transformed by ever-larger boom-and-bust cycles in the tech industry and its close cousin, the real estate market. The famous landmarks mostly remain, though the vistas are gradually shrinking in the face of construction, while the social landscape increasingly resembles that of Manhattan, where earlier influxes of wealth led to the gradual exodus of its middle- and lower-class inhabitants. How far down this path San Francisco will travel, how soon, and with what consequences for its fabled ethnic diversity and the character of its neighborhoods remain open questions. |