KING OF THE CLICKS
Why S.F.’s A-listers smile whenever they see Drew Altizer — and how he changed society photography
How Drew Altizer reinvented society photography in San Francisco.
It’s 8 p.m. on a recent Thursday, and the Marni boutique on Maiden Lane is buzzing with the chatter of dozens of guests sipping Champagne at the store’s grand opening. One person is running late — having lost his cell phone and scrambling for a ride when he couldn’t call Uber — and he’s a key to the party’s success.
The tall, well-dressed man rolls up to the door and, walking in, is welcomed with smiles and kisses on the cheek. He is, after all, a familiar face at dozens of parties on San Francisco’s charity circuit each week, but you won’t see his name in the society pages, even though he has done more to revolutionize the local boldface scene than anyone in recent memory.
It’s Drew Altizer, who is almost always in the center of the action — but is not the center of attention. The 46-year-old with a North Carolina twang is San Francisco’s go-to society photographer, a mantle earned in a decade-long rise from beginnings as an obscure selftaught photographer to darling of the A-list.
On this night, he removes his camera from a rolling luggage bag and susses out whom to snap. As attendees pose for full-length shots, a fashion earthquake occurs: One of the industry’s most important figures unexpectedly walks in. Altizer bolts forward, realizing it’s Hamish Bowles, international editor-at-large of Vogue, his camera
shutter whirring and flash tripping. Once Bowles is photographed with event co-hosts Sabrina Buell and Alison Pincus, the excitement’s over. Everyone remembers to breathe again.
Altizer’s snapshots from such store openings, fundraising balls and gala-night events do more than boost the egos of the well-to-do in attendance. When published in newspapers and magazines, the photos raise awareness about the nonprofit beneficiaries, and help them to raise money. But what sets Altizer apart is the way he has made photos available to the public at large — and inadvertently created a sociological phenomenon that has had San Franciscans clucking about the pecking order ever since.
Altizer arrived in the Bay Area in 2001, just as the photography world entered the digital era. While San Francisco society’s elder photo statesmen, Ray “Scotty” Morris and Thomas J. Gibbons, were still using film and developing prints, Altizer, the newcomer, seized on digital cameras that allowed him to shoot hundreds of photos (and to record the names of guests on audio files for captions that are outsourced overnight to the Philippines for transcription). The result: His photos could be e-mailed to media outlets the next morning — and posted online for purchase.
“They were on the back end of the film thing, and they didn’t switch fast enough,” Altizer says. “It was a moment of change, and I happened to be here at exactly that moment.”
Just as suddenly, people all over town began visiting www.drewaltizer.com to browse his photo galleries, with upwards of 1,000 photos from each event. Rather than having to wait for a week or more to see what was published, Altizer’s photos were posted within days. While shopping for mementos, website visitors were also scanning the photos to see who was at the party, what they wore, how they looked and, more importantly, to try and figure out why they hadn’t been invited.
“People are nosy,” says Sonya Molodetskaya, one of San Francisco’s most-photographed women. “It’s the one website where everybody can go to look at everybody else. I know tons of people who’ve done that for years. I can talk to someone about a particular event and they’ll say, ‘I know, I saw it on Drew.’ It’s almost like a society column itself.”
With a crew of 18 freelancers, Altizer is the largest game in town (his chief rival is event photographer Moanalani Jeffrey), shooting up to 80 events a month across the Bay Area, with a growing client base in Silicon Valley. He charges $500 and up per event, depending on how many media outlets are serviced with photos, to keep prices down for the charities that dominate his client base.
Morris, 83, who worked as a news photographer for the Examiner from 1957 to 1967 and shot society parties for years afterward, marvels at Altizer’s methods.
“If I was on an assignment and shot 60 or 100 pictures, that was a hell of a lot of pictures,” the retiree recalls. “Drew shoots thousands, because he can sell them on his website. He has changed the whole face of photography in San Francisco. He would’ve put me completely out of business.”
Altizer, raised in Virginia and North Carolina, is the son of a divorced homemaker and a furniture and textiles executive (his stepmother runs a design showroom). His boarding school days lent
social polish, but at 16, in high school in Harrisonburg, Va., he was out in the streets, so to speak, working during nonschool hours as a trained emergency medical technician. “It felt like a privileged experience,” he remembers, chatting over a salad at Blue Barn on Polk Street on a recent weekday. “I don’t mean that in the snobbiest way. I mean that it was something most people just don’t get to do, and you see things that most people just don’t get to see.”
He went to college to become a doctor, and majored in theater instead, explaining, “To the degree that theater is in some way about the human experience, you get to think about yourself in that context. Those were new ideas to me.” After a stint at the family business, he moved to San Francisco in 2001 to become a product designer for a home furnishings company. After taking photos of antiques one day in a North Beach shop, he got home and looked at what he’d shot, and something clicked. “I’d always drawn and painted a little as a kid, but I could never get on paper what I had in my mind’s eye, and this just did it, instantly,” he recalls.
He spent the next year teaching himself photography, and in 2002, he got a gig shooting for a friend of a friend, retired real estate broker Tom Kelley, at a party for Project Inform. Through word of mouth, his enterprise grew. “He’s turned San Francisco into this glamorous party town,” says Kelley, a fan of Altizer’s upbeat energy from the start. “It always was to us, but to the rest of the world, it wasn’t. Now you’ll look at a magazine like Town & Country, where they’ll have parties from New York and San Francisco, and San Francisco looks like a fairy princess land. The photos are gorgeous — so well-lit, so well-done. You’ll look at parties from New York and they look drab. The parties may be fantastic, but there’s life missing from the photos. Drew takes care.”
Altizer, who lives with his girlfriend, Camille Hayes, in a Green Street apartment in Pacific Heights, has a life outside his work (sea kayaking, landscape photography) and enjoys what he does — photographing everything from priceless pieces of art and philanthropists to celebri- ties and even President Obama. He describes himself as competitive and doesn’t want the job to become rote.
“There’s a part of me — and I would not do this — that would like to start my own biz on the side, one that’s just me shooting and competing with my own company, as an exercise,” he says with a laugh. “I find competition stimulating. And mostly, competition is competition with myself.”
The Marni party Nov. 5 was the last of three on Altizer’s agenda, after starting at the opening of the J. Rachman interior design boutique near Zuni Cafe, and a private dinner for supporters of Napa’s Festival del Sole, held at the Broadway mansion of arts patrons Ann and Gordon Getty.
“The interesting part of this job is not the gossipy stuff about the people, because at the end of the day, people are people,” Altizer says. “Rich people have slightly more expensive problems of the same nature that the rest of us have. It’s the diversity of experiences I get to have and backstage access that I enjoy. Like riding in the ambulance, I get a really private view.”