Category: Photography

I’ve somewhat inadvertently stumbled upon a when-the-sun-goes-down motif as I trip down San Francisco memory lane, so I’ll continue with that. (Part of this is because for some reason, it’s much easier to color-correct in Photoshop these nighttime shots).

These two photos were taken on February 20, 1995, of the AIDS benefit performance “Classical Action: A Concerted Effort Against AIDS” which featured Van Cliburn and Carol Burnett, among many others. Over $1,000,000 was raised that night. I most definitely did not attend, except from the outside. I was shooting outdated Kodachrome, which took the evening’s red lighting scheme and ran with it. The first shot is of the Davies Symphony Hall, while the bottom one is from the War Memorial Opera House across the street.

Two images, taken on the same winter 1995 evening, on the same corner, where Union Street intersects with Webster, in the Marina District of San Francisco. I can’t remember, but I doubt that this sandwich place is there anymore. Il Fornaio, a well-known group of upmarket restaurants and bakeries across California, whose sign is reflected in the sandwich shop window, is definitely not in this location anymore.

I never did care for this area, it being the heart of San Francisco’s young upwardly mobile professional set, with a healthy supply of meat-market pick-up bars, but I did shoot here often, and made a 16mm film out of footage shot at night here, in part because one could count on it being a reasonably safe place to walk around with a Bolex at 11 at night.

I have no idea what the lone customer of the sandwich shop is looking at. Perhaps he’s just trying to avoid my gaze. In all the years that I passed this shop, which I did often as my bus line the 22 Fillmore made its turn on this corner, I never saw but one or two customers at a time in it.

Somewhere around late 1993 or early 1994, I discovered slide film, and specifically Kodachrome and Fuji Velvia transparency film, and for the next few years I shot a ton of slides in and around San Francisco. Digging around for the image of the drive-in movie theater previously posted, I started to memory-lane flip through the various binders of old slides, and scanned a bunch into the computer. So over the next few days I’ll present some of them here.

The above photo is of St. Ignatius Church, on the campus of the University of San Francisco. Though I shot this particular photo from the roof of the apartment building I was living in at the time, on the corner of Hayes and Cole (2085 Hayes St., if any of my readers from San Francisco are curious), this shot is more of less the same view that I had from my room, and was one of the best things about this particular apartment. The church is at the top of one of San Francisco’s many hills, and our flat being two blocks down this hill, the church’s physical location lent it a certain visual preeminence over my life there, even to a non-believer like me, which I think the photo captures. I have a lot of slides of this church, and quite a few with vivid skies such as this one, which I haven’t doctored up in Photoshop. I do have to say that San Francisco and the surrounding area has some of the best twilight a photographer could ever hope for.

With respect to the church, this particular structure dates from 1914, and is the fifth incarnation of the Jesuit church, which was established in San Francisco in 1855. Their third building, which was located at Hayes and Van Ness Avenue, was destroyed by a fire following the great 1906 earthquake, as can be seen in this historic photograph.