City’s oldest photographer takes walk on the noir side
The clarity of the light in San Francisco has always fascinated people — the shifting light of the summer fog, the soft light of autumn, the reflected light of the glass windows at sunset. But it is the shadows that interest Fred Lyon, who has photographed the city for a lifetime.
Lyon is the city’s oldest photographer and is bringing out the city’s newest book. This one is called “San Francisco Noir,” a portfolio of the city after dark. It is San Francisco in black and white, a city of fog, bright neon, dark alleys, trees outlined against the sky at dusk, streetlights, night people and streets full of shadows, where anything might happen.
The cover photograph of “San Francisco Noir” shows the essence of the book — a couple, shown in silhouette walking at night in the fog. The only lighting comes from the headlights of a passing car.
Lyon took it years ago, out near Lands End, “at the edge of the continent,” as he puts it.
“The fog adds a bit of mystery, and the night brings a little danger and all that,” he said. “It is the most noir picture in the book, and San Francisco is a noir town.”
Noir in his view is anything dark, edgy and mysterious.
There is a bit of Ansel Adams in Lyon’s work — he studied under the master — and a bit of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled view of San Francisco.
Lyon is 93 now and has been a photographer since he apprenticed at the Gabriel Moulin studio at the age of 14. He’s photographed presidents, fashion models, food, wine and San Francisco.
He made his living as a magazine photographer when the big, glossy magazines were in flower — Life, Look and dozens of others. “That party’s over, but I’m having the time of my life,” he said. “Photography has changed, and I have changed with it.”
Now he’s into books. “Noir San Francisco” is only his second. He has thousands of negatives, and computer tools make it easy to access his files.
Many of his noir pictures are from the ’40s and ’50s, but some are new, even if Lyon has slowed a bit. He had to be careful shooting the 500 Club on Guerrero Street the other night. “I’m slow and nearly got hit by a car,” he said.
The older pictures and the newer ones blend well despite the changes in the city. “San Francisco still has all of its stuff,” Lyon said. “Some of the older pictures could be shot today.”
“It wears its history well,” he wrote in his earlier book, “San Francisco, Portrait of a City.”
Lyon is tall and slender and speaks slowly, as if every word is important. He tells stories carefully, every detail as polished as a smooth stone.
He worked in the White House for a bit, photographing the presidents: Roosevelt, Truman and others. “Handshake shots,” he calls his work there. Then he went to New York and talked his way into being a fashion photographer.
“Being young and brassy got me everywhere,” he said.
He loved the intensity and the energy of New York but was always drawn back to San Francisco. It is home to him; he is a native San Franciscan.
“There is a feeling we all have that we are special here,” he said. “There’s a restlessness here, the idea you could be anything you wanted. And that goes back to the very beginning, to the Gold Rush.”
Like many people of a certain age, Lyon thinks the best of times came when he was younger, in the years after World War II, up to the late ’50s.
“We all had a great time then,” he said. “We were out to a different club every night. There was jazz, and the music was magic. We didn’t have drugs then, but we were pretty good boozers.”
That’s when he discovered the city at night, the lights and shadows he calls noir.
Lyon’s noir San Francisco is a gritty place with hard edges, a version of the city Hammett called “as real as a dime.” And part of it is what Lyon calls “a fond myth.”
“It’s because we want the city to be this way,” he said. “It’s part of our mystique.” It’s still here, too, he thinks.
“A lot of this new stuff is pretty interesting,” he said.
Lyon’s book comes out Thursday, followed by a show of his work at the Leica gallery, 463 Bush St.