I was nostalgia tripping a bit tonight.
I was thinking recently about how some of these Ai companies going public is about to mint thousands of fresh new millionaires in San Francisco and its surrounding, affluent, environs. I never thought I’d have a third row seat to the death of a city’s pulse. This feels like a nail in the coffin. Coincidentally, in a search for a set to post this week, that didn’t require hours of culling and editing, I ran across some of the first, intentional, sexy photos that I ever created. The story of the Dead Electric Jellyfish. Is a story for another time.
But I was reminded of this shoot with some similar themes. And I’m such a better photographer here than I was back in 2003. A different person in a different City.
Shooting Sakura in her super sweet bottom floor Victorian apartment. This was in 2016 and we didn’t think we were on the precipice of tremendous change. We thought we were about to see the first woman elected to President of the United States. Not that the person sitting in that office has much of anything to do with the “progress” and change afflicting SF. That can be attributed to unfettered capitalism of which both parties are guilty.
This is the second set of Sakura to go up. I don’t think it’s ever been published before. The shoot was originally for Me In My Place. There’s at least one, maybe two more sets from this batch left to go. You can see the entire set on Patreon here.
The last gasps of the coolest fucking city I’ve ever known. Los Angeles has always felt like a stone octopus, sprawling and unknowable. Indifferent. New York was just too big to wrap your arms around. And the winters wanted to kill you. San Francisco was home. I’d grown up with it always twinkling on the horizon just across a sparkling bay. It’s only 7x7 miles. 49 square miles. Less than a million people. It was knowable in a grand sense, in an intimate sense. I had the gist of it from growing up here. Bay Bridge is that way, Golden Gate Park was this way, the Zoo was over there. If the Bay was to your right, you were facing north. You could walk to the Golden Gate Bridge if you really wanted to. I got to know it deeply when I set up shop there in the early 2000’s.
Little nooks of discovery. Neighborhoods with their own pace, culture, climate. Navigating with paper maps. We took it for granted. That this beautiful, freak show had always been and always would be. Most of the freaks have been priced out. The warehouses, work spaces, music venues have been bulldozed to build multi million dollar condos we can’t afford. Long gone are the underground raves and artist’s communities. It feels like we’re replacing our hearts with machines and I don’t like it one bit.
I miss you San Francisco.