The city revealed

I recently reviewed Fred Lyon’s remarkable photos of the city at night, full of atmosphere, shadows and neon, the book was aptly titled San Francisco Noir. Portrait of a city 1940-1960 is full of wonderful daytime photos (though there are some night shots in the back pages) and what I particularly liked was the way Lyon searches out a different take on a familiar subject. Obviously the Golden Gate Bridge is featured with twelve pictures including a painter walking up one of the cables with the bridge stretching into the distance or a shot looking down one of the huge pillars to the south tower’s base surrounded by a wall (interestingly full of seawater inside the wall).  The city has lots of hills with Lyon emplacing the rather treacherous steepness, page twenty-seven shows a couple, as the caption says: Navigating Nob Hill’s steep sidewalk in front of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Other shots reveal boys taking advantage with their skate coasters. Cable cars are here too but who has seen one, on page thirty-three, of four men pushing one off the turnaround or an overhead shot of a car on the turnaround at Market and Powell Streets.


There plenty of photos showing people going about their day and Lyon manages to take these without a posed look. Men playing boules in the park, sidewalk fruit sellers, pedestrians looking in a shop window or just sitting on a bench outside a shop, these photos perfectly capture the everyday but with clever framing that pulls the eye into the picture. There are several photos near the back of the book where Lyon reveals  a more artistic feel to his images, soft focus and long exposures which are actually appropriate to their subject, the San Francisco ballet and a jazz club including a wonderful shot of trumpet player Muggsy Spanier over a page and a half.

 The book’s production (with a two hundred screen on matt paper) is an interesting mix of one photo a page but different sizes, page and half and several black spreads with a photo and some text in white, the layouts with their various photo sizes really help to project these fascinating photos. This book and Lyon’s noir title give a unique day and night photo tour of San Francisco.