The First of the Month — Photo Journal 2017, Week 9
My biggest photography priority this week was to get some dust removed from my Ricoh GR lens. After a few tentative DIY attempts — and realizing most of the YouTube tutorials out there were in Russian (not the best week for that kind of stuff) — I went to my go-to guy David at Camera Heaven.
The best thing about Camera Heaven is that they have always fixed my cameras quickly, competently and for a fair price. The second best thing about Camera Heaven is their location: the Tenderloin, and I mean the real epicenter of the Tenderloin, as in Larkin and O’Farrell.
You have to be buzzed into Camera Heaven, because as David said, in all sincerity, “A lot of people around here are mentally ill.”
The Tenderloin is not the type of neighborhood you should walk around flashing an expensive camera or smartphone at people, and the mood on Monday the 27th of February seemed particularly angry and edgy. I took a few photos with my iPhone using the Hipstamatic Uchitel film/Vincent lens combo and then briskly walked to SFMOMA to see the Diane Arbus “In the Beginning” exhibit (for the second time).
When most people think of the photography of Diane Arbus, her later, close-up work is what probably comes to mind.
The “In the Beginning” exhibit (which started at MOMA in New York, is currently at SFMOMA in San Francisco, and hopefully will be coming to a museum near you soon), is devoted to Arbus’s early days as a street and documentary photographer. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she quit the fashion photo business she ran with her husband and tried to determine what it was that she really wanted to explore through photography.
I was so moved the first time I saw this exhibit that I went back. Looking at Arbus’s earlier images, you can literally feel her tentative attempts at making photos of the strange and interesting (or “aristocrats” — as she referred to her “freaks”).
Like most of us who take photos in the street, we know the “learning curve” you’re on to obtain the confidence to approach someone and ask if you can photograph them. You start slowly, photographing from great distance or seeking out the human condition in inanimate objects — advertising, mannequins, movie (or TV) screens.
Like Arbus (and this is the only comparison I will dare to make), I moved from those subjects to the easily approachable — animals, children and drag queens, those who are happy to strike a pose, or contentedly oblivious.
On the 1st of March, I returned to the Tenderloin to pick up my Ricoh at Camera Heaven. I intended to do a few more shots in the monochrome combo on my iPhone I used earlier in the week, but the mood on the street was decidedly different. There was a freakish, Mardi Gras vibe, with people dancing (or weaving) and singing (and screaming).
What had changed in a couple of days in the Tenderloin? Although the anger and edginess was still there, it was buried beneath a celebratory layer fueled by alcohol, drugs and prescription medication.
“It’s the first of the month and everybody just got their checks,” a man trying to get a room for the week at one of the transient hotels told me. He had tried every hotel he knew of so far, and offered the person who came to the door at this one $100, only to be turned away.
Maybe it was the chihuahua in his coat?
To see my complete 2017 Flickr photo journal (so far), click here.
Or, read back issues of the 2017 photo journal here:
Week 1
Weeks 2–3
Weeks 4–5
Weeks 6–8
