San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Photographer captured S.F. at night
“Fred had such a zest for life, and he absolutely loved making pictures.”
Penny Rozis, wife
It was appropriate that photographer Fred Lyon died in August, the foggiest month in San Francisco.
He was at his best capturing the mood of the mist in the dim glow of a street lamp in the dead of night on a dark alley in North Beach. By day he shot the steep streets with big-finned American cars parked on the angle, and the ironwork on the Golden Gate Bridge. Whatever he shot had the effect of a film noir: blackand-white and melancholy.
Lyon’s documentary career started when he photographed President Roosevelt at the White House as a Navy photographer during World War II and did not end until he captured the neon cocktail glass on the sign at the 500 Club in the Mission District in 2017. For that shoot, he was out there at night in his mid-90s, still tall and skinny as a lamppost. His wife, Penny Rozis, had to brace him so he wouldn’t fall off the curb and get hit by a car on Guerrero Street as he framed his shots. With five books behind him, he had two more in the works when he died Aug. 22 at his home on Lyon Street in Cow Hollow. He was 97.
“Fred had such a zest for life, and he absolutely loved making pictures,” Rozis said. “He always said one of the most important qualifications for any occupation was curiosity, and he had endless curiosity.”
He was curious about high fashion, which offered him a living in New York City after the war as a commercial photographer shooting department store ads and editorial content for the big national magazines like “Vogue.” He was curious about interior design, which got him jobs for the likes of “House and Garden.” He worked his way up to freelance assignments for “Life,” and “Time,” and was shooting assignments for “Sports Illustrated” even before its launch in 1954. He shot travel spreads for “Holiday.”
“Fred is a throughline for 20th century photography,” Philip Meza, a consultant and writer, who penned a biography of Lyon. “You can tell that story by using Fred’s career. You have fashion, shelter magazines, news magazines, ad houses during the ‘Mad Men’ era and fine art.”
Lyon never thought the term “fine art” applied to his images. When he returned to San Francisco in the 1950s, he started going out at night as a hobby after days of shooting commercial projects.
“I didn’t want my camera to cool off,” is how he once explained it to a Chronicle reporter. “There are things about this city that don’t change. And I do love those.”
He never printed his negatives, which sat for decades in a box buried in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in his studio near the Marina Safeway. He was 80 when he finally got curious enough to stoop down and pull out that envelope and what he saw “made me a little scared,” he later recalled. What he had seen would give him a second career that brought him more acclaim than the first one did.
The contents of that box gave Lyon his first book, “San Francisco Then,” published in 2005. The same body of work brought a second book, “Portrait of a City, 1940-1960,” published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2014, and an exhibition, “Fred Lyon-San Francisco,” at Leica Store & Gallery near Union Square. Princeton also released a follow-up, “San Francisco Noir” (2018). His fourth book, “Vineyards” (2019), showcased his color images from the Napa Valley, Chile, France, Germany and Greece. His fifth book, “Inventing the California Look
through the Lens of Fred Lyon,” featured his commercial interior design work, and came out this year.
“The big thing about Fred was he lived in the present 100%. He was only interested in the now and doing things now,” said Michael House, who made the one-hour 2014 documentary “Fred Lyon: Living Through the Lens.” “He was always making new images and always involved in new endeavors. This made him a wonderfully fulfilled man,” House said.
Frederick George Lyon was born Sept. 27, 1924, at St. Luke’s Hospital in the Mission District. His father had farming interests and the family moved to the Peninsula, first to San Carlos and then Burlingame. Lyon got his first camera at age 12, and by age 14 he was showing talent. His parents allowed him to move away from home at 17 in order to attend the Art Center in downtown Los Angeles, where he was selected to spend a summer photographing Yosemite, under Ansel Adams, who was then on the faculty.
When Lyon turned 18, he joined the Navy with the intent of becoming a pilot in the war effort. He made it into flight training in Florida, but there was a surplus of pilots, so was assigned to a photography unit in Washington, D.C.
Once there, he got the job shooting the Roosevelt family portrait and ended up in his Navy uniform, the tallest person in the room, shooting President Truman at his first press conference.
After the war he moved to New York and got commercial work as a fashion photographer, where he met model Ann Murray. They were married in 1952 in New York and settled in Sausalito, where they raised two sons, Michael and Gordon. He spent a lot of time crossing the Golden Gate Bridge commuting to commercial shoots and became curious about the bridge itself.
This led to his only museum exhibition, “The Bridges of San Francisco: Perceptive Photography by Fred Lyon,” at the Legion of Honor in 1955.
Ann Lyon died in 1989. Four years later, Lyon ran into Penny Rozis, an interior designer. They met on a shoot in the 1970s and reconnected. She hired him to do an interior shoot at an estate in Brentwood and that was followed by commercial shoots at a beach house in Santa Barbara and a mountain house in Sun Valley. Their relationship only blossomed from there.
For 20 years they lived in a Pacific Heights condo that required hiking up four flights to reach. When Lyon reached age 87, he decided he’d had enough stairs and they moved to a first-floor condo in Cow Hollow.
Lyon moved his studio to the basement of the condo building, but he never stopped going to work, though he did move his start time from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. His ritual scotch-and-water was not until 6 p.m., though if guests arrived, he’d mix up a batch of Manhattans.
Lyon liked to repeat the Billy Crystal line, “It’s more important to look good than to feel good,” and he was debonair and charming until the end, in a black or gray turtleneck and black-framed owl glasses.
He left behind two unfinished book projects — his images of the American West, and a book of his photographs he planned to market to kids. He knew that topic well, having started his career as one.
“I’ve been at this now since I was 14,” he said in 2010, “and I have to tell you, I’ve never been bored.”
Survivors include his wife, Penny Rozis of San Francisco; sons, Michael Lyon of Sopchoppy, Fla., and Gordon Lyon of Santa Fe, N.M.; and stepson, Pavlos Rozis of Chicago.