garrison beau scott

We, I, spend so much of our life looking straight ahead. Maybe it’s the fear of missing the oncoming light from that train steaming down the tracks, heading right for us. Maybe it’s conditioning, or that we’ve forgotten what it was like to follow the stray ant or solitary bird in flight during the strolls of our naive youth.

I try to make it a point to look down, or up, as much as I can when I’m walking with the camera. There’s so much offered at a 45 degree angle to our normal P.O.V.

This was taken during one of the Saturday morning walks when I was mentoring in the First Exposures Photography program through SF Camerawork.

I can get as frustrated with humanity as the next guy. Not Unabomber frustrated mind you, though I often fantasize about having rocket launchers affixed to the hood of my car. Some people just don’t seem to understand the concept of Slower Traffic Keep Right.

But I digress.

Humanity. Sometimes frustrated with. But not all the time, in fact more often than not, usually with camera in hand, I rejoice over humanity’s simple touch in the things I find myself gazing upon. And I like to consider myself a person who can see the big picture, so my mind wanders to this child, and the parents who were able to put a smile on that face. And what of the person who turned the photograph into this. Did someone else staple it to this post…and so on, all the way to the guys who laid the bricks for the building in the background and the family dinners that were paid for and laughed over from their efforts.

Put a stone in my head and I might start thinking about the various (perhaps nefarious???) activities that go on in that building today.

But again, I am straying from the point.

San Francisco is an amazing city. Unless you’re looking for a parking spot. I didn’t live in the city, so I didn’t have to endure the sometimes endless search for a place to put my car on a daily basis, but I did go into the city enough to develop a real disdain for driving there.

Fortunately, San Francisco, much like NYC, is a town you can get to, and around in, without a car. And as a photographer who likes to walk, and walk, and walk, well a car only gets in the way. When this was taken, sometime in 2000, I was living in Marin, which is north of the Golden Gate. There are two options for mass transit for getting into S.F. One is the bus, which takes forever, and the other is the ferry. Which is a 45 minute bit of heaven. Awesome views, wind in your face observation decks, warm and toasty inside seating, AND they serve beer and wine.

Suffice to say, I took the ferry. Which is how and why I got this shot. After a day in the city, I was on my way back to catch the boat home, walking up Market Street. The building in the lower left is the clock tower at the Ferry Building, and the spotlights that run up the center originate at The Embarcadero.

On my way to the first Thursday gallery openings in San Francisco a few years back. I had the Voigtlander with me and came across this old beat up Victorian about mid-Market Street. I think it was the plastic in the windows that first caught my attention, but then I quickly noticed the birds hanging out along the edges. I looked through the ground glass at my composition and though I liked what I saw, there was something missing.

I knew that if I waited long enough, one of those damn birds would take flight. I just didn’t realize how long it would take. So I framed the shot, resigned to the fact I would have to live with the power line. At the time, I avoided power lines like sunsets and kittens. Don’t get me wrong, I like pictures of sunsets and kittens, even kittens at sunset, especially in a field of flowers, and throw in a kid eating an ice cream cone and my cup runneth over, but I leave the taking of those shots to the ones who do it better.

Anyways, as I was saying, I made it a practice to avoid at all costs power lines, but for this shot I had no choice. At the time, I thought I could just re-touch the negative and made up my mind not to think about it any more. Besides, I had enough on my plate, standing there on Market Street, holding a twin lens Voigtlander out at arms-length, chest high, and fielding questions from an inordinate amount of people wondering what the hell it was I was doing, all this without taking my eye of those birds and wishing just one of them would decide to see if anything was happening somewhere else.

If I remember correctly, I had to change my exposure a few times, and about the time I began to wonder if the birds on the ledge were actually rats with a suicide pact waiting for the first one to jump, it happened.

When I got it home and printed it for the first time, I realized that the wire needed to remain in the shot for balance. And I thanked the gods of Bresson for his lessons.

I have a rather large cache of exposed film with no real provenance other than a few random markings. Every once in a while, I’ll grab a roll or two and drop them off with film I’ve shot more recently. Sometimes I’ll look at the processed roll and wonder if I was even the photographer who took the pictures contained within the emulsion. And other times I’ll see a frame or two and say something along the lines of, “So that’s where that ended up.” Or, “I remember that.”

Here is one that I remember. It was taken in San Francisco on April 30, 2004. It was a crisp spring day with heavy traces of winter still in the air, and the wind was whipping around in Union Square. In the north east corner, there’s a plot of this long grass, and as we were sitting on one of the benches close by, warming up with some coffee, I saw all the movement in the grass, accented by the fading afternoon light.

It’s funny how you can forget some things, and then remember every detail.