The vibrant heart of a colorful San Francisco neighborhood is on full display in Dick Evans’ “The Mission.”
With its pages teeming with vibrant color, Richard Evans’ new book on the Mission District illuminates the heart, soul, and diversity of one of San Francisco’s essential neighborhoods.
Yet “The Mission” (Heyday, $30, 176 pages) is more than an attractive coffee table book. In 178 full color photos, Evans captures the Mission as a cultural hub, with the murals, mercados, restaurants, music and public events such as Carnivale brilliantly portrayed.
Especially the murals. There’s a deeper documentary sense in the book’s striking photo essays, with the Mission’s politics and protest, spirit of resistance and solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide eloquently expressed in its public works of art.
In a recent conversation about the book, Evans, a San Francisco resident, said the book came together at a time of enormous change in the city.
Evans, who lives in Cow Hollow with his wife, painter Gretchen Evans, is the author of a previous book, 2011’s “San Francisco and the Bay Area: The Haight-Ashbury Edition,” which included his photographs of murals on the city’s legendary Haight Street. He’d been considering another book of San Francisco photo essays for some time.
“People kept asking me if I was going to do another neighborhood,” he said, “and a number of people mentioned the Mission.”
The suggestion “grew in resonance and significance,” Evans said. “The Mission is such a microcosm of all the pressures that we’re seeing in the Bay Area — the clash between cultural heritage and gentrification, housing prices and now the immigration issues, but particularly around housing and the squeezing out of the local culture.”
Indeed, the Mission seems to be ground zero for change in San Francisco these days, and Evans is concerned that much of its cultural richness — in particular, the artistic traditions that have produced some of San Francisco’s great murals — may be lost along the way.
Surprisingly, Evans, a native of Oregon, has spent much of his life away from the city. An engineer who worked in the global metals industry, he started his career with Kaiser Aluminum. That job, and later positions with Alcan, took him to Africa, West Virginia, Canada and Europe.
Throughout his travels, he developed a passion for documentary photography, recording images of the cities, towns and rural areas where he was stationed.
After retiring, Evans and his wife moved to the Bay Area in 2009. He started taking pictures of San Francisco, including the Haight-Ashbury photos that were published as part of the 2011 book.
For “The Mission,” he started touring the neighborhood, meeting people in stores, restaurants and art collectives. One key connection was with Precita Eyes, the venerable Mission-based muralists’ association. Susan Cervantes, Precita Eyes’ founder and executive director, contributed an essay to “The Mission,” and Evans said that proceeds from the book will support the organization’s work in schools and throughout the community.
Evans organized “The Mission” in sections. “It started with 15 or 20 subjects, including Mexico, Central America, indigenous Americans, Mission Dolores, black power, gay rights, virgins and goddesses and gentrification” said Evans. “”As we got into it, we realized that many of these overlapped — and we realized that the murals were the expression of all of these social and cultural issues.”
The book begins with a foreword by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and an introduction by artist Carla Wojczuk and includes images of the Mission’s architecture and eateries alongside portraits of the people who live and work in the district and run the neighborhood businesses.
Yet the murals are central to the book. In one powerful photograph, Ohlone descendant Vincent Medina stands in front of a re-creation of “Mission Dolores Mural.” The original work, placed behind the Mission Dolores altar more than 200 years ago is still in place; the one in Evans’ photo was razed by fire and not replaced; the building was torn down.
Evans says new murals are being created. “They’re growing, they’re multiplying,” he says. “It’s a respected part of the culture.” Yet he worries about the future.
“The concentration of art and culture — and the strength of that — is unique in San Francisco,” he said. “The only other neighborhood that has maintained such a strong cultural identification is Chinatown.
“What makes the Mission particularly interesting and unique is its mural scene. It’s got a strong international flavor to it, and that’s running head-on with the housing crisis, the proximity to the freeway, buses transporting techies to Silicon Valley. It’s become a very popular place, and one reason people live there is they love the culture. The question is, will gentrification hollow that out?”