I’m not going to lie, this is a lot of pictures. I could do a tighter edit, but I really like all of these, and there was almost no work on my part. I shot them, I ran the film here, and then I took them and had them scanned at Photoworks SF, and that’s pretty much it. I didn’t even do the fancy deluxe scans, I did the 5x7 scans. They’re perfect for throwing the pictures up here on the interwebs. No, they’re not paying me.
Just a little post, with a few things to say. I’ve been walking the same streets a lot lately (which may have been evident by the two posts about the mission, or all the odd salon posts, etc). And there’s a vein in photographic thought that echoes the popular sentiment: that if you’re not doing something new, you’re not doing something worthwhile. St Winogrand said something along the lines of “I never want to take the same picture twice.”
This was getting to one of the many things that happen around 16th and mission; I have no idea what I was doing there, and I’m too tired to go look it up. I just finished sorting through the roughly 12000 photos I took in 2017, looking for more San Pablo work. I found quite a bit, and realized in the sorting that 2017 was a hell of a year. A whole crapton of things happened.
I’m grouping these together because I feel like it, and because I can. They’re from two recent Odd Salon events. There’s a kind of coverage that one of the regulars (maybe a fellow?), Alexander, does very well: the long lens, close portraits of all the speakers (if I knew what his web site was, I’d link it here). I tried my hand doing that, and found that I was much more interested in watching the talks. So now, when I have my camera, I might shoot a couple pictures of whoever is speaking, but I’m also just as interested in all the things that happen around the event.
This was the second one of these I went to, and the first one I’ve taken any pictures at (that I recall; the last one was last november). It was just this incredible, engaged group that was gathered to talk about art that was happening in the media right then; Childish Gambino’s This is America had just dropped, as had Dirty Computer and one other thing I can’t remember; I think most people talked about the first two. Good discussion, but you really had to be there.
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