S.F., L.A. come together in early photos
During the postwar housing boom, San Francisco photographer and art professor Minor White went out to the sand dunes to shoot a boxy new Streamline Moderne home for sale, next to a vacant lot.
That stucco one-story, over a garage at 1958 42nd Ave., is still there, and its occupants will receive unexpected publicity on Friday, Oct. 12, when “Boomtowns: How Photography Shaped Los Angeles and San Francisco” opens at the California Historical Society.
White’s image serves as both the beginning and the end of the exhibition. The beginning because it is blown up to wall size at the gallery entrance. The end because the picture was taken in 1949, to complete a photographic survey that begins with the Gold Rush, in 1849.
“San Francisco had this early tradition of photography, from the 1850s, because people were really interested in this remarkable city,” Garcia says. The CHS was founded in San Francisco in 1871 and was among the first collectors of the photographic record. But it was always a statewide organization, and when Los Angeles started to build out with the arrival of the railroad in the late 1870s, the CHS was in place to snag the earliest images of that growing city.
“We have a copy print of the earliest photograph known to exist of a view of Los Angeles,” she says. “We also have a panorama that shows what L.A. looked like in about 1869.”
One hundred years of development are distilled into 150 pictures that take up the entire main floor of the CHS building.
An S.F./L.A. show is tricky to organize and display due to the historic animosity San Franciscans have toward Angelenos.
But Garcia grew up in both places and holds degrees from both University High School in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley, and she has held curatorial jobs at both the Getty in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
She can work both sides, and was non-prejudicial in organizing the show. She never had to leave CHS headquarters, formerly Hundley Hardware on Mission Street. The photography vault in the basement holds maybe a million pictures.
“We have this incredible photography collection that is strongest in street views in respect to these two cities,” she says.
The main gallery mingles the earliest imagery from both cities. The four side galleries are segregated by city, two each.
Much of the early San Francisco stuff comes from the big names — Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge.
Much of the early Los Angeles stuff comes from shooters hired by magazines like Sunset, to promote the city on behalf of the big passenger railroad lines.
“They were all trying to sell L.A. as a semitropical paradise, as an Eden,” Garcia says. But before too long, the cars were already winning. Pictures show traffic jams when the roads were still dirt.
The most impressive body of work on either city comes from German geographer Anton Wagner, who crisscrossed Los Angeles on foot in the 1930s, armed with a Zeiss Ikon camera.
Unsurprisingly, the sand dunes Minor White photographed next to 1958 42nd Ave. were soon covered with homes. The stucco home that looks white in his image is now pink. There is a security gate at the entrance, and the small strips of lawn have been paved over. Garcia sent the owner a handwritten invitation by U.S. mail (just like in 1949) to the opening reception of “Boomtowns.”