CHAPTER ONE: The Story

Before the boom of tech brought a great city to its knees, San Francisco was a nice place. Yes, it was raw, filthy, foggy, and shining-brilliant white. The air would smell of eucalyptus, citrus and fresh oysters. There was poverty and sadness. And there were days when the mist would carry the smell of ocean spray across the great city, while the sands of Baker Beach lay cool and bare, with waves pounding like a slow heart. 

The Mission was a Hispanic neighborhood then. The birthplace of burritos. The corners of blocks were flea markets, and the streets were lined with thrift shops, closet-sized liquor stores and storefront churches. You could buy one hundred tortillas for a dollar or, at a cafeteria, a stale donut and a coffee for forty-nine cents. Decades-old cars were still clinging to life. Palm trees rose above the streets. 

It seemed that the entire city was made of the same light-toned cement. There were stucco houses painted every shade of white, and every color of bleached pastel. Further inland, great wooden houses stood proudly–their elaborate woodwork painted in bold colors. And when the sun shone strongly through the fog, the city-hills had a ghostly, almost holy, glow. 

North Beach, The Mission, Chinatown, Haight; San Francisco was a city made of unique neighborhoods packed tightly together on a seven-by-seven mile peninsula. There was a beauty in the old streetcars, cable cars, ferry-boats and bridges. Even the dated subway stations had a certain charm to them. There was an elegance to be found everywhere in San Francisco, even underground, like the Broadway Street tunnel–a stunning specimen–fully tiled a creamy yellow and brightly lit against the perpetual dark. 

There was wealth, but it was more rare then. There was crime; there were gangs. And the city was home to many talented graffiti artists, some of them prolific, and even successful. Skateboarding was a kind of urban ballet with free admission. And late at night, people gathered on downtown street corners, emerging from darkness with a boombox and a sheet of cardboard or wood panel. And out on those street corners they would break dance into the late hours of the night–the thumping of the music flowing through the vacant streets, as if the sounds were lifeblood sustaining the city as it slept. 

There were chess tables in public squares. You could pay three dollars to play a game against your choice of disheveled-looking old man. If you won, you got your money back, plus a bit extra. If you lost, the house kept your money.  I learned later that there were hustlers who owned the tables, and the expert chess players–some of whom appeared homeless–kept only one dollar for every three they took in.   

In San Francisco, there were beautiful and strange pieces of public art–unique and hidden–like The Poetry Rock Garden with its giant boulder that had been carried into the city from the distant mountains. A poem was etched into the cement walls of the courtyard surrounding the stone–the words partially veiled by ivy and weeds. Hidden behind the boulder was a leaky tap. Something easily overlooked. That rusty tap released a single drop of water precisely every second. The water dripped and splashed upon a smaller stone. The artist had engineered the rusty tap that way so that it correctly measured time in secrecy, appearing as an accident or, perhaps, as a miracle to anyone who noticed and held their watch to it. The measure of time in that courtyard swelled into a measure of geological time, for boulders such as that one, and mountains too, are all eventually washed away by tiny drops of water. 

 Before photography had fully gone digital, I worked in a darkroom shop in the neighborhood known as North Beach: an Italian neighborhood and the famed location of the Beat Poets during the 1950s. At that tiny photography shop, we mostly developed film for magazines or advertising. We printed blurry and overexposed family photos from a thousand summer vacations and sometimes we did work for artists. We sold film and a few accessories. Business was slow. 

From Valencia Street, I took the bus to work every weekday morning. I lived in the Mission district during its first phase of gentrification: when the artists moved in. Two blocks west of Mission Street was Valencia, running parallel to Mission. Valencia Street was a little quieter than Mission Street: Not as many bus routes, no subway stations, less hustlers. At the corner of Valencia and 23rd Street, I leased a one-room apartment over a taco shop. 

I had come to San Francisco to attend art school in the early 2000’s. Newfoundland, Canada, was my home. Attending the San Francisco Art Institute, I fell in love with the city and decided to stay.

CHAPTER TWO: The Photo

The work of a darkroom technician is quiet, alchemical and subterranean. I usually worked alone, in complete darkness, or in the incomplete glow of the red safelight. In this coloured almost-dark, objects only partially revealed themselves, like some essential element that existed in daylight had retreated. Shadows lacked detail and people looked strange. 

The safelight was a necessary tool. It enabled the gift of sight as you handled the light-sensitive paper. Without it you would be forced to develop the photos in complete darkness–the images over or under-developing as they emerged unseen. I found solace in this world of emergence, of imperfect light and shadow.

The development of film, however, was always done in complete darkness. Before cracking open the film-canister with a bottle opener, it was imperative that you laid your bottles of developing chemicals and film reels and canisters in a clear and logical arrangement. And it was important that this arrangement remained constant over time, so that your movements in the darkness were as familiar as the rising and falling of your chest. Shutting off the lights, you would first crack open the canister and remove the coiled film. Then, working blindly, you took the loose end of the film and slowly wound it onto a reel. Once loaded, these reels would fit neatly into a martini shaker-like canister that was able to contain four stacked reels. Placing the cover on the canister, you then reached in the total dark for your developing agent and poured it through a smaller lid at the center of the first lid. Then, you rocked and shook the canister as if making a cocktail in slow motion. While you did this, you counted out the seconds in your head. Shake the canister too fast and the resulting images would end up faded along their lateral edges. Shake the canister too slow and the final images would look hazy and muddled. After silently counting to the correct time, you poured out the developer and then reached for the stopping agent and poured it in and shook the canister again. This ended the period of development. Lastly, you poured out the stopping agent and poured in the fixer. This neutralized the entire process and gave a promise of the film’s longevity. Now you could turn on the light. Rinsing and dumping out the reels, you then unrolled the film and hung it from a clothesline in long, dangling strips. Here, the negatives would dry. 

What appeared before you then were darkened images of someone’s life in miniature. These images were invariably an inversion of the world, for upon the negatives the highlights were darkened and the shadows glowed luminously; here, the world was turned inside out. In this topsy-turvy way, secrets were revealed and untold stories emerged.   

Placing the developed film into the heavy metal tray of the printing projector, and then loading the apparatus and focusing the image, had all become second nature to me. Adjusting the focus knob with one hand, hunched over an eyepiece, I enjoyed watching the coarse grain of a blurred image gradually, and then suddenly, become sharp and near–the grains gathering to reveal a moment arrested in time, forever. Here the world returned to its positive reality. 

It was an ordinary day in the darkroom and, as had become my routine, I loaded the tray with the first section of black and white film without having investigated the images closely beforehand. I had come to enjoy this form of introduction to the photos: through the projector. With the first frame of the negatives in the tray, I loaded the projector and began to focus the image with my face only two inches away from the surface of the projector’s base. This is where the image would appear and later be burned into photo paper. 

On this particular day, with this particular roll of film, right where my eyepiece was placed, a partial image emerged: a beautiful young woman’s face and her bare, delicate shoulders. Her mouth was wide open, her eyes closed and her head tilted upward. And then, maybe an inch from her mouth, to my surprise, was a thick, large penis with loose foreskin and two testicles the size of duck eggs. As I slid the eyepiece up along the image, a great length of flaccid cock was revealed, followed by neatly trimmed pubic hair and then a taut and muscular abdomen. Shocked, and also excited, I quickly drew the eyepiece back down to the woman. From her beautiful, smooth face I scanned down the image to her impossibly full and perky breasts. Her soft nipples pointed upward. She was slender and, beneath her large but youthful breasts, her ribs pressed tightly against her skin. I quickly switched the projector off. 

Was I embarrassed? Aroused? I left the projector and unrolled the rest of this photographer’s film on the light-table and, with an eyepiece, examined the full roll of images, one by one. In this way I could take in the whole image at once, though in its negative reality. What I discovered was not homemade porngraphy, but a very professional and high quality erotica. The images all appeared to be taken in the same studio, with professional lighting, and with the same female model in every photo. Then I noticed that there were different male models in the images. There were never any sexual acts, though there were many erect penises and suggestive poses. The images were charged with a sexual desire yet to be consumated. The men were all trim, muscular and well endowed.  A little shaken from the experience, I decided to take an early coffee break, and so I went for a walk. 

Just a few blocks from the darkroom was Caffe Trieste. The coffee there was old-world Italian. Pungent single shots of espresso were made thick and fragrant from a blend of arabica and robusta coffee beans. Usually I prefer a light roast, filter coffee, but, when I am in a certain mood, I feel the long arm of tradition reach out to me and fold me into its warm embrace. That day was such a day; I needed some semblance of wholesome tradition. I ordered a single espresso and a small, wafer-like cookie. The dark, oily coffee coated my palette and the bitterness was pleasurable against the honey-sweet, crisp wafer. I felt my mind open like the parting of clouds and a liveliness returned to my body. After only a few minutes, I was back on the street, walking with a sturdiness in my posture and a bounce in my step.

I began to think over the morning’s events. The images churned in my mind, flashing in and out like an old hand-crank animation machine. Who was the photographer? Had I seen them drop off the film at the darkroom? Was the photographer a man, a woman? Was I aroused by the images? Disgusted? I really wasn’t sure how I felt. Walking along the busy street, I tried to brush off the confused feeling. 

Returning to the darkroom, I immediately dove into my work and spent the rest of the day developing the film into 16×20 inch prints on a matte-finish paper. The finished quality of the photos was staggering.