Another blogger, SunandGold, recently did  a posting from her time spent in San Francisco. Her interest and fascination with the city/culture was shared by me 45+ years ago. I promised I would post these photos from 1970 in one posting ( rather than individual posts that I did in the past) so she could get a slight inclination of what the city was like all those years ago, measured against her recent visit to the city.

If you look closely at the image of Vanessi’s you will see a woman walking alongside the building, having come down Telegraph Hill. The image below, looking up that same street, shows a lone man in a suit walking to work ( this was a morning shot). Anyway, two points:the woman is wearing a scarf. This type of dress or accessory died off or fell out of favor shortly after this time. Also, personally for me or about me, both of these images portray the individual /subject as being a small, insignificant part of the world they are captured in, in terms of composition. To this day I have continued this approach, portraying a sense of ‘aloneness’, in many street shots of people. It almost seems like an unconscious methodology or approach to people. Even in the most crowded of spaces, people find themselves isolated. The images with cars in them also help validate the point in time in which I shot these film images all those years ago.

 

I think the rest of the images are, for the most part, self explanatory. Of interest might be the image adjacent to the City Lights Bookstore. If you look at the reader board on the building you can actually read the band/musicians on the bill for that week, which in some sense helps to corroborate the time at which the image was shot. Keystone Korner was a great venue for catching current musicians such as Boz Scaggs and Bennhy Cecil and the Snakes! I think it was an over 21 club, but I could be wrong.

Thanks for going along for this short ride into the past with me!