Creative flow: landscapes of the city’s sewer plant
Way back in the early 1990s, before all of San Francisco was seemingly a construction zone, photographer Mark Citret had to go out looking for them. His approach was to find something that was still the bare bones of a foundation, set up his Ansel Adams-style view camera and shoot it as if it were nature at its best.
“Without pride or embarrassment, I can say that I find the rebar and concrete of a construction site every bit as beautiful as fir trees delicately outlined by freshly fallen snow, and the apparent solidity of an office building as lyrical and ephemeral as fog floating over a sunlit ocean,” Citret says.
The beauty in his statement was that he was talking about the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, commonly known as the sewage treatment plant. Twenty years later, these construction images are getting their gallery premiere at RayKo Photo Center, a few blocks south of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Citret, also a master printer,
Parallel Lines:
10 a.m.-10 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday-Sunday. Through Oct. 14. RayKo Photo Center & Gallery, 428 Third St., S.F. (415) 495-3773. http://raykophoto center.com made 49 black-and-white gelatin silver prints for “Parallel Lines,” which also features a monograph.
The photos are mingled among the large-format cameras, 1940s photo booth and photography ephemera that make up RayKo, a unique private photo facility that is free and open to the public.
To contrast with Citret’s sewer site landscapes, RayKo is also showing a documentary series on public schoolteachers in San Francisco. Called “No Child Left Behind,” the digital color images are by former teacher Victoria Heilweil, who was able to infiltrate, among others, the elementary school where her daughter is a student.