Painted Ladies of San Francisco
Photo Location: Alamo Square, San Francisco, CA
There is a view from Alamo Square Park that has been photographed so many times it has become genuinely difficult to make an image of it that isn’t already everyone’s screensaver. The row of Victorian houses on Steiner Street, painted in the pastels that give them their name, lined up against the San Francisco skyline with the downtown towers rising behind them — it is one of the most reproduced cityscapes in California and one of the most immediately recognizable urban compositions in American photography.
I came to it on a morning when the fog was still sitting on the bay and the early light was catching the facades at a low angle that brought out the depth of the paint colors — the cream and sage and ochre and pale blue of the trim — in a way that the flat midday light never does. The houses were built between 1892 and 1896 and they have been standing in front of that skyline ever since, watching the city grow up behind them across more than a century of fog and sun and earthquake and reinvention. The contrast between the Victorian ornamentation of the foreground and the glass towers of the Financial District behind them is not subtle. San Francisco wears its entire history simultaneously, all of it visible in a single frame from a park bench in Alamo Square.
The city Dorothea Lange called home for forty years. The city Ansel Adams photographed before the skyline behind those houses existed. The city that keeps changing and keeps looking exactly like itself.
TruLife acrylic-mounted limited edition of 100, signed by me with Certificate of Authenticity. Free US shipping.
Image copyright © Jongas Fine Art Photography.
