About a week ago I wrote a post-it on my desk that said "Photograph Divis," using the shorthand name for the main business street near my house in San Francisco. I was inspired to write this initially because I had a sense that the street was changing (as all streets with businesses on them do). It's being slowly cleaned up, with more boutique coffee shops and groceries coming in. I believe the days are numbered for the incense and wig stores, not to mention the auto shops that were a mainstay of this historically African American district.
It's being made more gentrified for people like... well me, as ambivalent about this as I feel about this.
And then returning this weekend from a trip to Los Angeles, something deep in my memory banks reminded me of Ed Ruscha's 1966 work Every Building on the Sunset Strip. I was doubly-inspired.
When I think about Google maps, with street-level photographs taken by machine, I'm struck by how methodical Ruscha would have had to be in '66. For him it must have taken a lot of time, and been a way to experience and observe the patterns of Los Angeles, and in a way to take a snapshot of a street going through changes all its own.
So here's the first photo session for Divisadero, obviously incomplete. More soon.
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