I made a trip to San Francisco to visit CCA in March 21st. I've been miss the street, city and crowds there for long time. Because, stay in Fort Worth, I couldn't find some interesting subjects for the street photography. I always like to travel to bigger cities like Dallas and Austin to get some good shots. Garry Winogrand had been and spent the last years of his life in Texas. He took photos in Dallas and Stockyards in Fort Worth. I traced Winogrand's trail to the Stockyards, but all I found was commercial street scenes, events and tourists. Therefore, I decided to go San Francisco again for visiting school and making some street shots.
This time I didn't take my 5D mark II but my Nikon F3 film camera with three different Lenses (24mm, 50mm and 80-205mm) which I brought from my formal professor. I really want to know how to make a street photographs without using digital cameras. Especially, I want to tried to control everything by myself instead of sitting up the aperture priority or shutter priority on a digital camera. In history of photography, there are lots of genius of photography shoot on the street with their 35, 50 or 24 millimeter film cameras, such as Henri Catier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander.
As same as last time I went to SF, I stayed at the North Beach Hotel. A cheap, crappy hotel located in Chinatown on Kearney Street. I still like there because there are a lot of historical sites, and also authentic Chinese restaurants. The City Light Bookstore is five minutes away from the North Beach Hotel, the bookstore firstly published the literature of The Beats Generation includes Jack Kerouck's On The Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl, both are my favorite writers. The museum of the Beats Generation is close by the City Light Bookstore which is weirdly surround by lots of stripe clubs. At night, the whole street is filled with neon-lights.
Stay in San Francisco is very connivence, I usually woke up around 9:00 and walked about 15 minutes from my hotel to Market Street, one of the main streets of downtown San Francisco. Then I would catch the buses and their subway called Bart to anywhere I want to.
The Market Street is one of the busiest streets in SF. The public transportation, office buildings, restaurants and fashion stores gather around the downtown, the large population moves around here all day long. I liked spending my time wander around on the Market Street, because there are millions of possibilities to make good street shoots. I just needed to walk around with my camera, and I let the street tell me what to do, I needed to concentrate on not only visual objects but also the sounds, and smells on the street. As a form of art, photography is a very personal thing, I had to be alone to follow my intuition in order to express my subjective emotion and ideas by creating the images from the objective world.
My emotion and ideas must some how connected with some other photographers (Artists) in the history whom I found the similarity through viewing their artwork that could shares the same kind of life experiences, thoughts and world-views with me.... Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Daido Moriyama became my strong influences.
San Francisco is a hilly city, I was exhausted after walking up to the hills. However, the best view of the ocean is always on the top of the hill. That was my first time hiking to Fillmore street, a part of the street is on the hill. After I finished visiting the school, I took the bus to Fillmore, I was hungry and tired, however, I was still wandering on the street and didn't want to go back to the hotel. I saw the sunshine on Fillmore was very beautiful, I wanted to spend this good time to take more photographs and visit more local places. The houses, theaters, fancy stores and restaurants are intensively locate on the both side of the street. The houses are colorful, blue, yellow and purple, I always want to move into anyone of these houses, I wanted to stand on the roof of the house and look at the sea.
There are any kinds of stores and restaurants on Fillmore. I was hunting for the food for so long, and finally, the afternoon warm wind took me in to La Mediterranee which is obviously a Mediterranean restaurant. After I had a cheap dish of lunch special chicken with felafel, an Irani girl with brown hair served me a small plate of Baklava, and it was amazing.
I was still wandering in these city, I feel like this is my home, I feel like I have no desires of being a working-class person (However, I have to make a living) but a person who can witness the life, ...I like wandering in the city, because I like to see different faces with different emotions. The world is always moving, changing without a rest...I was wondering how can we constantly keep an authentic life-style in this restless city...I wish I can push the shutter to capture that only moment of authentic life and let it preserve and extend the stories of life.
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