Ocean Beach and the Murphy Windmill
Went on a photo walk yesterday out by Ocean Beach with friend-of-the-newsletter Rowan. Still have to spend too much time fiddling with settings on the Z6 but I'm starting, slowly, to get comfortable with it.
I'm Nat Bennett. You're reading Photo Newsletter, a weekly e-mail about photography and my photographic practice.
It was my first time going out that far west. I've lived and worked in and around San Francisco for -- has it really been seven years now? -- and I'd never been to the ocean.
Back in the before times, when I worked in an overgrown not-quite-startup in SoMa -- the age of scooters, the age of the open office, the age of beer fridges and BART rides -- I took pride in the fact that I had seen more of the city than most coworkers who lived in it. San Franciscans at the time were as bad as New Yorkers for parochialism, but they couldn't even work themselves up to being proud of it. I grew up around a New York City uncle who once declared, "I don't go above 59th street" as if it were a pure fact of the universe.
I lived in Oakland ("I'm around the corner from a Whole Foods, mom, I'm fine.") and I didn't even really "go out" but I made a point of getting out.
In retrospect it's amazing that it took me so long to discover photography, because I had a photographer's impulsive-propulsive mania to go, to see, to look, to wander around with nowhere in particular to be.
I spent my first Saturday here wandering around Telegraph Hill and the Embarcadero. I signed up for a yearlong membership for the Exploratarium, and arrived at Coit Tower just after it closed. I went back a few months later, determined not to miss out on "tourist stuff" just because I lived here.
Do you like photo books? I love them. Things like Some Los Angeles Apartments, Sleeping by the Mississippi, or The Americans. Not books that happen to have photos in them, or books that are about the content of the photos, photos as illustration and accompaniment. Books that are books, that are about things, but in pictures, without words, or with words pushed into a supporting role. Books not with pictures, but for pictures. Visual poems, and records of inarticulable obsessions.
They are odd and secret things, an awkward, feral cousin of the more respectable coffee table book. They are almost utterly ungooglable: The phrase brings up services for making family photo albums.
There's this genre of photobook that I'm starting to think of as "the pandemic photobook." NOTICE by Wesley Verhoeve is the most explicit member of the category, about the experience of photographing during the pandemic, but Teju Cole's Golden Apple of the Sun is also clearly a member, since the book's content (the contents of Cole's counters) developed from the constraints imposed by the pandemic.
And then there's Craig Mod's Kissa by Kissa (sold out, but you can sign up on that page to be notified of the next edition). Shot, and largely written, before the pandemic, but edited at the time it was and into the shape it was because of the pandemic, in place of a then-impossible planned walk.
I think there's more like this out there. I'm keeping an eye out for it. Books shot during the pandemic, edited during the pandemic, when all these photographers roaming, compulsive photographers had to shut up and stay home and edit.
I used to go to a coffee shop most Saturdays. I used caffeine and a love of milk foam to lure myself out of the house, where otherwise I would have stayed, folding in on myself, slowly going crazy on the internet.
In the worst months I made a project out of it. I'd Google "best coffee shops in San Francisco" and work down whatever list was the top result this time.
I stopped doing this during the pandemic-- the worst of it, anyway, before the vaccines. I had other out of the house rituals. The first winter, that winter when we didn't know if the Trump administration or COVID-19 would ever end, I walked around outside Cole Valley, at night, in the dark, once a week. Sometimes I got dinner with a friend, but sometimes we just walked.
The city seems different now that I'm not in it once a week. It seems almost unreal, just ever-so-slightly dissociated. I'm in it at odd times, and in odd places, no longer part of its daily mass rituals, its deep motions and its life. I'm some visitor, barely there.
