An early snapshot of the Bay

When you enter the great orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge, you’ll most likely see lots of tourists taking photographs. Which is one reason the city by the Bay is reportedly the third most photographed city in the world, behind New York and London.  

San Francisco’s connection to photography is nearly as old as the medium itself -- as can be seen in “The View from Here,” a photo-retrospective at SFMOMA -- the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- that goes back to the city’s earliest days.

KALW’s Steven Short brings us this snapshot of the show.

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STEVEN SHORT: San Francisco is a popular tourist spot, as everyone knows. Not only is there varied terrain, but turn a corner and you’re likely to find yourself in a totally new neighborhood – one that might even be mistaken for a different country! 

This is nothing new to residents of the area, but visitors, past and present, have always found the city full of such exotic happenings that to simply talk about them was not enough.

ERIN O'TOOLE: Hearing about it and seeing paintings was one thing, but seeing a photograph really brought it home.

Erin O’Toole appreciates this perspective, because she’s…

O’Toole:  …assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA.

And she had to go through thousands of images to select the 275 that are now on display in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 75th anniversary exhibition. The reason the collection is so large…

O'TOOLE:   …is that SFMOMA was one of the first museums in the country to promote photography as an art, on par with painting and sculpture. The only other museum in the country that did that, in 1935, was the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

And it’s appropriate that San Francisco values photography, since photography’s starting date, in this country, is considered to be 1839 – just a decade before gold put San Francisco on the map.  So that’s why O’Toole says San Francisco is probably the first city to have ever been documented by a hired photographer.   

Three of those initial shots are on view in the first room. They don’t show anything out of the ordinary, which is exactly what the businessmen who commissioned them wanted.  

O'TOOLE: In the photographs there are quite a lot of churches, which was a way to denote that San Francisco was, in fact, a God-fearing city, and not a place of, you know, vigilanteism and drunkenness, which was it’s reputation at the time.

O’Toole says this photographer was specifically ordered not to include saloons, and to skip over the contemptuous, despicable, out-of-control, Barbary Coast.

But turn a corner in this exhibit, and, as with the real city itself, you’ll see a totally different scene.

O'TOOLE: We have a beautiful view of the Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill from around 1868. But what’s interesting is that this was before the Marina was filled in. So the edge of the city is different in this photograph than it is now. So it’s a little bit difficult to figure out where you are. 

Perhaps you’ve had that experience in the Marina yourself!  But this scene is notable for another reason: it’s by Carleton Watkins.

 O'TOOLE: Carleton Watkins was one of the most important photographers of the 19th Century in California.

His photos of Yosemite and California nature in general were some of the first seen by people in the rest of the country.

O'TOOLE: And I think that’s the thing that’s really important to think about, is that when people saw photographs of the wonders of California, it really convinced them that it was this Eden.

As we turn another corner – as if turning pages in a walk-through photo album – we’re in another exotic district, and this one…

 O'TOOLE: ...really made San Francisco different from any other city in America.

This was a place that – well, most Americans, then and now, would have to see it with their own eyes to believe.  And if they couldn’t do that, then photographs would convey the exotic wonder. This strange locale was called…. Chinatown.

O'TOOLE: A lot of photographers went there to take pictures of life in Chinatown because it had this really exciting, exotic, maybe sort of dangerous flair.

O’Toole points to one of the exotic occupations depicted in the photo:

O'TOOLE: One is of an accountant.

An accountant!  This may be the only time you hear an accountant being called “exotic.” But in the photographer’s defense, look closer…

O'TOOLE: And you can see that they’re using an abacus and writing in Chinese characters in a log book.

These shots were, in essence, forerunners of today’s post cards. Tourists wouldn’t have cameras in their telephones for many years to come – nor would they have telephones, for that matter – so commercial studio photographers had a monopoly on photographs.

But that would soon change, as the last picture in this room illustrates.

O'TOOLE: The last picture in the room is in a round format and it’s essentially one of the first snapshot photographs of Chinatown. We know this because the round format, like that, was made from the first Kodak snapshot camera.

According to O’Toole, this camera was the Kodak Number One.  The photo shows a simple Chinatown street. But it’s museum-worthy, she says...

O'TOOLE: ...because it shows that it was a subject for tourist photos, even back then, in 1890.

San Francisco was not just an early adopter of this new technology; the City’s native son, landscape photographer Ansel Adams, was instrumental in the recognition of photography as an art form in the 1930s.  

Curator Erin O’Toole also points out that today there are many schools in the Bay Area that expose their students to photography, along with practitioners and innovators and collectors of its various forms who call this picture perfect place home.

 In San Francisco, I’m Steven Short for Crosscurrents.

“The View from Here,” will be on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until Sunday, June 27th.