Slices of life on S.F. streets
From 1930s to ’80s, photographer took extraordinary shots of ordinary people
For more than 50 years Joseph Selle was a human landmark in San Francisco. Everybody knew him, and he knew everybody because he’d probably taken their picture.
Selle was a photographer who made his living snapping random pictures of people walking down the street. He carried a big, old camera, wore an important-looking cap that made him look like a cross between a ship captain and a cop. He’d stop prospective customers in mid-stride and snap their picture, and hand them a card: “See How You Look in Action. Three pictures for $1. Mailed anywhere.”
He worked every day, rain or shine, mostly in downtown San Francisco, but also at the Cliff House and sometimes as far afield as
Sather Gate at UC Berkeley. He took a million pictures, all of them of ordinary people — rich, poor, young, black, white, Latino, Asian. If someone walked the streets of San Francisco between the mid-1930s and the early 1980s, Selle probably took their picture.
Now some of these pictures — all slices of life in the city — can be seen online, part of a project by the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y.
“The work of street photographers like Selle didn’t start out to be art, but you can make the case it turned out to be art,” said Andrew Eskind, a photography associate of the workshop. When Selle was in his 70s, he gave the negatives to the workshop, where they have remained as thousands of rolls of film. At the time, the workshop had a strong connection with Eastman Kodak in Rochester.
No one knew quite what to do with the collection, though it was an important bit of what’s called vernacular photography. Eskind said private donors made it possible to digitize about 10 percent of the collection — 100,000 or so shots — and put it online.
“It’s a monster of a collection,” Eskind said. “It takes time to look at 100,000 pictures, I can tell you, but you get hooked. All you need is an interesting one once in a while.”
Many shots from the collection were taken in front of the old Pix Theater, a third-run house on Market Street near Powell that offered three “action hits” and six cartoons, all for 50 cents.
Selle liked the Pix because the night lighting was good. From the marquee, it appears that the photos were taken in winter 1960. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was playing.
There are also pictures from the ’60s shot at Union Square and the Cliff House.
Even a cursory look at Selle’s pictures shows a very different San Francisco. The people walking the streets then were much better dressed than current San Franciscans. Many of the men wore coats and ties, and the women wore hats, or at least scarves. San Francisco was a Navy town in those days, and there are lots of sailors in uniform, a rare sight now.
These were the days before instant photo technology. A customer paid Selle, and he promised to mail them the picture. It was a tough sell, but Selle was a master salesman. He knew whom to photograph and whom not to photograph. Couples were good, families with kids were better.
“It was all speculative, all street salesmanship,” Eskind said.
Selle himself explained his method in a 1956 interview in The Chronicle. “You have to case the people,” he said “You have to look for those who are receptive.
“You’ve got to learn the difference between the ‘no’ that means ‘no’ and the ‘no’ that means ‘yes.’ ”
Selle was born in 1906 in either Sleepy Eye, Minn., or Minneapolis, depending on who was asking. His father was a photographer, and young Joe learned the street photography trade at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1933. He came West when it ended.
At that time, there were dozens of street photographers working all over the country, but San Francisco looked especially good to him. Even though it was the depth of the Depression, the city had a reputation for style.
Selle’s biggest years were the boom times after World War II. “The streets were crowded, even at night,” he told the San Francisco Examiner. “The theater marquees were lit up so bright it was like the Great White Way in New York, so you could work day or night.”
At one point, Selle had two dozen cameramen working for him and a downtown office. He called his operation Fox Movie Flash.
By 1968, he was the last of his kind, lamenting that times had changed. By 1974, he said, he had slowed down. He claimed business was slowing too: He took 250 pictures a day, he said, and sold only 20.
Selle was still at it in 1981, talking about the old days, still shooting away. He told a reporter that if he made lunch money that day, he’d be happy. He retired more than once.
Selle died quietly in San Francisco in January 1988 at 82. He had invested his photo income in property and a ranch in Sonoma County, and when he died, according to columnist Herb Caen, he was a millionaire.
“If you didn’t save one of Joe’s photos of you and a chum walking up Stockton St. toward El Prado,” Caen wrote, “you aren’t a San Franciscan.”