Red wall

Untitled, San Francisco, May 2007.

Every city needs a hideaway to mute the hurlyburly of living in it. It can be as grand as Central Park or as modest as a rock (shade would be nice, ocean view optional). What matters is getting a chance to zone out and tune in.


I have such a hideaway in San Francisco that is as modest as hideaways come: benches made of concrete with a grove of bamboo trees beside them. Behind the benches is a wall of fieriest red that blazes even hotter during certain points of the day. The bamboo leaves would cast shadows on it like Chinese brush paintings that move with the wind. The traffic signs would make patterns on it that remind me of Paul Klee's balloons. The shadows on the wall mesmerize like passing clouds that you watch while lying barefoot on a knoll. It's my hideaway, and I won't tell you where it is.

Paul Klee, Red Balloon, 1922.

Signs

Buy, BART Station, San Francisco, March 2007.

Back in 2007 when I shot this picture, I thought it was a wry comment about runaway consumerism in our society, where everywhere you turned screamed buy, buy, buy! A culture of excess. What a difference two years make. Nowadays, in our cash poor, stimulus-hungry economy, shopping has become a civic duty.

Those who forget the past... yeah,we know, but we repeat it just the same. Take Dorothea Lange's signs from the Great Depression: substitute "Obama" for "Olson," and you're back in the winter of 2008. Or the gas station sign from 1938. The same sign can be recycled for the angry mob that demands greedy heads to roll at AIG and Merrill Lynch.

Every overleveraged speculator who watched his credit rating go down the tubes last year will get a sobering slap on the wrist from Robert Frank's gambling hall sign from 1955. To risk what you can afford sounds logical enough, but the warning underestimates human nature's capacity for folly, which is the greatest risk of all.

Yet it is also true that time and again, we have seen how man has managed to pull himself up from the rut he has created. Through imagination, innovation, and resourcefulness, man has persisted, even prospered, when the notion of prosperity itself seemed far-fetched. So we turn to yet another sign, from W. Eugene Smith's colossal Pittsburgh Project, at a time when we are bereft of dreams. And if by chance it feels premature to dream that better things will come our way soon, perhaps we can agree to just settle for a good night's sleep.

Dorothea Lange, Newspaper Stand, San Francisco, 1939.
Dorothea Lange, Kern County, CA 1938.
Robert Frank, Untitled, 1955.
W. Eugene Smith, From Dream Street: The Pittsburgh Project, 1955.

Passe-partout

Untitled, San Francisco, March 2009.



These pictures are as much about spaces as they are about the people in them. Choosing the space comes first, which can be anything that attracts my attention: the magnificent monolith of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, polygons on the sidewalk, wood grain in plywood, a fire escape ladder that hangs precariously from a red brick building, a bistro's brightly colored neon sign, or just fierce blackness.

Sometimes it's the way light casts shadows on the space, creating a veritable gateway to Hades, a sharp diagonal or a leafy foliage that looks like Chinese brush painting.

The space is the canvas that awaits the emergence of figures. Like Doisneau said, they will come. When they arrive, one looks for the way they order themselves against the canvas, for gestures and silhouettes that complete the image itself.

Writer Kerstin Engelhard of Leica Fotografie International said the spaces reminded her of passe-partout, the multi-layered mats used to frame a picture. The space is a frame. Inside it is a moment of sheer ordinariness, invariably of figures walking, but a portait just the same.