Tag Archives: marina

Photographs: Architecture, Photographs: San Francisco

Detail, Palace of Fine Arts

Image July 24, 2020 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Detail of a small section of the Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco.

Perhaps I was channelling my inner Atget when I made this photograph a few years back. I was wandering around San Francisco with a camera — a favorite activity in non-pandemic times — and I ended up at the Palace of Fine Arts near the waterfront. It is a remarkable place with a remarkable history. Originally constructed as part of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, it was the only structure that wasn’t taken down afterwards. Originally meant to be a temporary feature of the Exposition, it deteriorated and was eventually completely taken down in the 1960s and reconstructed by the mid-1970s. .

Something in the photograph illustrates how I do (and do not) see when I’m making photographs. One one hand I and other photographers often see things that others might miss. On the other hand, because we are focused on one way of seeing our subject we may entirely miss things that are completely obvious to others. Sometimes we “discover” these elements of our photographs later. (Someone pointed out that a difference between photography and painting is that the photographer cannot know everything in the image.) In this case, it was only years later that I noticed the rather striking symbols that appear on the surface of this building — symbols that no sane person would include today. This led me to some quick research that suggests that in 1915, and before the atrocities of WWII, the symbol in question had an entirely different meaning.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.

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Photographs: San Francisco, Photographs: Urban/Street

Marina Auto Body

Image February 24, 2019 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Two women stand in in front to the painted walls of Marina Auto Body, San Francisco

Marina Auto Body is not a place I had previously noticed on my San Francisco street photography walks. I’m a bit surprised, as it it is just a short distance down a side street that I almost always cross when walking from the train station toward the central downtown, and I have photographed other subjects near this intersection. Perhaps this time I missed the walk signal, looked around for a moment, and happened to see it.

I think that I perhaps first noticed the two figures standing in front of the show and set off against the mostly-blue paint of the building. I walked up the street so that I could be directly across the street to photograph — I might have wished to be a bit closer, but I had little choice given the wide and very busy street. I waited, and finally was able to photograph during a break in the traffic. The little building is visually remarkable, with vividly painted scenes on each of the large doors.

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