Posts in Category: California
27 years
As of August 31st, 2016, I have been in California for 27 years. I moved here with my best friend Brian, who had accepted a job offer in San Francisco a few months after graduating from Lehigh University. Knowing that I didn’t like my job in Maryland just outside the D.C. Beltway, and that I was losing my free room and board because my parents were moving back to Dallas, Brian suggested I move to San Francisco with him.
I thought about it for five minutes, said “What the hell, I’m in”, and by the second week of August, 1989 we were heading west from the Jersey shore in a Ford Aerostar minivan loaded with clothing, minimal furniture, and Coors Extra Gold. We drove the southern route and saw a lot of weird shit in Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This old scanned photograph from a campground near the Grand Canyon is just one example…
By now I have lived in California longer than any other place in my 52 years. If I could I would trade some of the shitty times during my 27 years here (like being a poor student in Santa Barbara in 1991) for an extra year or so in Singapore when I was a teenager and in Tokyo when I was in my twenties.
But I met my wife here, and I wouldn’t trade her for anything. And I finally found a rich creative life here, after several crummy careers that didn’t suit me or that I didn’t suit. Yep, I have my wife and her love, and my view of the world through a camera held by the man that California has helped me become. And barring a couple of chronic physical ailments and psychological quirks, I am often at peace with who I am and who I still want to be.
So for me it’s California. It’s good here.
(Picture taken at Flintstones Bedrock City, Williams, Arizona, August 1989)
Determination
At a Mexican supermercado, she really wanted some Cheetos…
…so, by god, she got herself some Cheetos…
(La Hacienda Market, South San Francisco, California 2016. Published with additional commentary on Scholars and Rogues.)
Outtake from a wedding
A few weeks ago in mid-May, I photographed a wedding at San Francisco City Hall. Afterwards the bride and one of her brothers walked past this guy standing by himself in Civic Center Plaza, obviously protesting gay marriage. The bride was in a happy, jaunty frame of mind, and it was humorously ironic she and some of her wedding party walked by the solitary, disgruntled man…
(San Francisco, 2016)
Mean street cutie pie
She was tagging along while her dad walked his dog along Palou Avenue in Hunters Point in San Francisco. Dad and the dog are on the left. On the sidewalk nearby there was trash, discarded clothing, and a dead raccoon. Hunters Point can be that kind of neighborhood. But that didn’t keep her from skipping, giggling, hugging dad’s dog, and being the cutest thing lighting up the street that day…
(Hunters Point, San Francisco 2016)
Balloonery
At the Spring Open Studios in the Hunters Point Shipyard, purple balloons were de rigueur for the day as markers for signs and chairs in the parking lot…
(Hunters Point, San Francisco 2016)
The grief motorist
His name is Michael and he was sitting in his car on Dubuque Avenue in South San Francisco, separated by a K-rail barrier from the spot on Highway 101 where his cousin Odalys was killed. He visits the spot from time to time, smoking cheap, fragrant cigars and staring through his exhaled smoke at the passing traffic while wondering how his cousin ended up on foot on the 101 where a car hit her and took her life. He says the cops still don’t know; after three and a half years the case is still open. Michael thinks foul play may have been involved. He misses Odalys very much and just wants to know why she died.
Michael got out of his car for this photograph, and to graciously give a summary of his story…
(South San Francisco, California, April 2016)
Find the kitty
The neighborhood story is the old man who lives in this house is a millionaire widower whose wife died 25 years ago. She was a beautician, the story goes, and the man keeps the old-fashioned hair drying machine on the porch to preserve her memory. He comes out at least once a day and sits in the hair dryer, watching the world go by but never speaking to anyone.
(Hollister, California, April 2016)