San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Meet Vivienne Scholl, the photographer behind Parked Portraits.
Parked-car Instagram posts rolled into gallery show, coffee-table book
After she wrecked her back at the gym, graphic designer Vivienne Scholl was prescribed long walks, which would have been lonely without all the middle-class midcentury American cars that live on the streets of San Francisco.
Scholl became friends with the parked Corvairs and Valiants and Darts and Beetles she’d pass while walking from her doctor’s office up near the University of San Francisco to her home in the Castro. She started posting their portraits to Instagram, and, as is the intent with all social media, a distraction became an obsession. Parked Portraits is now a brand with a logo, a website (www.parkedportraits.com), a gallery show and a coffee-table book in development.
Cars in parking lots do nothing for her, and neither do cars parked perpendicular to the curb. Scholl shoots only cars parked parallel. Cars parked in driveways might as well be in the suburbs.
“I’ve tried to take pictures elsewhere, car shows or whatever, and it is totally uninspiring,” she says, during her regular Thursday walk home from the doctor. “In a compact city like San Francisco there is a short distance between a car and a house. So the house creates this perfect canvas like in a painting. That’s what intrigues me — the interplay between car and house.”
There are other Instagrammers who post parked cars in San Francisco. One of them @parkedinsf, has 2,885 followers, nearly twice as many as @parkedportraits. But Scholl, 46, may be unique in that she has no car herself. She covers the city on foot, as a function of her transportation.
Her husband, statistician Kevin Potzner, doesn’t drive either, but he also does not share his wife’s enthusiasm for parked cars. “His thing is butterflies,” says Scholl, who runs her business, Avenue 4 Design, out of her home on Hartford Street.
Coming out their front door, they spot old cars more easily than butterflies. A tan 1964 Ford Falcon lives on their block, and that is always her first shot of the day. It never looks the same. Either the light is different or the angle is different or the house it’s parked in front of is different.
There are other cars she has gotten to know that she photographs every time she passes, just by way of saying hello. She knows all the street-cleaning days and when the old cars will be shifted to a new location, maybe in front of a house that has better character for a backdrop.
“There’s this white Valiant that I haven’t gotten a good shot of yet,” she says. “I got it once, but it was raining.”
The side streets around USF make excellent hunting because there is a collector, Nick Nichols, who parks a whole fleet of old cars wherever he can find spots for them. They are always moving, to stay ahead of the meter maids, but Scholl knows where to look, like a fisherman.
“I got obsessed,” she says. “I started to know where they live and go back to those streets to see if they are parked in a better location.”
Coming up Turk Street, she spots a find so perfect it would seem Nichols knew she’d be coming. A late ’50s pink Dodge Coronet is parked on the sidewalk up against a pink house.
“You can’t deny that a pink car in front of a pink house is just awesome,” she says.
The Coronet is so long that she has to back into the street to get it all in her frame, an occupational hazard of parkedcar photography. When she has moved back as far as she safely can into the street, she plants her feet and leans back farther, holding that pose like a water skier learning to ski on one.
“I don’t like the three-quarter view,” she says. “I just like the straight profile.”
The rest of her commute, from Lone Mountain down through NoPa, is only mildly productive. She bags a Ford Bronco with black-and-yellow California plates and a long white Pontiac Catalina.
Once in a while she will post a photo and be contacted by the car’s owner. This happened with Mike Spike Krouse. Scholl got a nice shot of his 1970 Camaro, just before it was stolen and gutted.
Krouse, as it turns out, is the owner of Madrone Art Bar, and in May, he gave Scholl her debut gallery show. On her walk home, she likes to go into the bar, at Fell and Divisadero streets, and see her work on the walls. On this day she notices one of her images is not straight and asks for a ladder so she can climb up and straighten it.
The solo show, titled “Parked Portraits: Vivienne Scholl,” runs through June 30. Fiftyfour automobiles are lined up on the wall and arranged by color, not brand. Each has a title — “Dolores Dart,” “SixtyTwo Savoy,” “Beetle Baker Blue,” “Best in Show” and simply “1977.”
There are the Chevrolet Malibu and Caprice, the Plymouth Fury and Belvedere, the Ford Ranchero and Chevy El Camino in the pickup truck category. But there are two models she needs that she cannot seem to find. One is her first car, a brown-and-tan 1980 AMC Concord. The other is her father’s sportier red 1976 AMC Pacer.
This was in Ithaca, N.Y., where the idea that a car of any value would be parked on a public street is completely foreign. The snow and the salt take care of that.
“For me, growing up you only saw a vintage car when it was moving,” she says.
To see them parked day after day, night after night, on city streets is a sign of optimism that is at the heart of her pursuit. In her years of walking, Scholl has never seen a classic with its window shattered by break-in thieves. Everybody seems to respect them. That’s the nut of the photo book she is sketching out, and she’s looking for a writer to help her articulate it.
“There’s this spirit in San Francisco that people value passion over pragmatism,” she says. “There are all these beautiful old cars, and people park them on the street. The book will be an illustration of that mind-set.”