City of contrasts

The black cover and inset photo of a couple almost in silhouette perfectly capture the book's subject and inside the two hundred photos from Fred Lyon deliver a unique view of San Francisco. Some of the street scenes could almost be stills from classic noir movies like John Houston's The asphalt jungle or Fritz Lang's Clash by night. The short essays at the front of the book don't date any of the photos but I think most were taken from the mid-fifties onwards.

Nearly all the daytime street scenes have wonderful dark areas even though they are a more documentary type of photo like the shot of the Theodore School of Music on Union Street (the front is a cross between a piano and an accordion) the entrance to the Morris Gift Shop designed in 1947 by Frank Lloyd Wright or several shots of the famous 1933 Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill Boulevard. Other ordinary street photos capture people looking in shop windows, workers in the fruit market, cable cars or pedestrians just crossing the road and almost in silhouette.

The first half of the book are more or less San Francisco by day then Lyon's work really comes alive with his night shots, using street lights, neon and headlights to capture some stunning street scenes of traffic, shops, movie houses, strip joints and bars. This section also includes several pages of nightlife interiors  like the Black Hawk with drummer Shelley Manne and a shot of Kenneth Rexroth reciting during one of his poetry and jazz sessions at the Cellar Club. There are also a few experimental shots included of a casino, multiple exposures of neon signs and musicians using long exposures.

I think it's worth commenting on the book's interesting production. In keeping with the noir feel of the pictures several pages are solid black facing a photo or a page and a half photo with half a page black to complete the spread, all this complements Fred Lyon's creativity. The images were printed as duotones with a two hundred screen on some lovely semi-matt gloss paper (which unfortunately means that the solid black pages tend to pick up finger marks).

Mister Lyon captures the City by the Bay perfectly.