OK, but is it Really that Red?

I don’t do a ton of planning before going out to shoot. I’ve found setting too large (or too specific) of an expectation leads to disappointment as a default response to final results. Figuring out any more than where to park and if any wasps will be there just turns the whole endeavor into a premeditated excursion, not exploration.

Still, going to see the Golden Gate Bridge was a rare opportunity to photograph a celebrity, of sorts. I felt some compelling force to study (look at other people’s pictures) before getting there. There’s a great one from Pete Souza that was taken when he was the official photographer for the Obama administration. Sure, it’s a photo of Obama that features the bridge, but he manages to frame it in a context that makes you understand both why it’s worth visiting and how “the leader of the free world” would visit it.

The only other pre-work I did was try and find an answer to one question: Is the thing really that red? It’s nearly impossible to tell for sure. Even if you remove variable factors like weather and time-of-day, modern photography editing tools offer nothing if not the chance to change how colors look in post-production. The color of the Golden Gate Bridge becomes a matter of personal preference. My acquired answer: it depends.

With that smattering of preparation, I set off with my partner and our local friends. When we arrived at the lookout point, there was a deep haze squatting on the bay. Anything more than 500 feet in front of us had a not-quite-olive-but-not-quite-sepia tone on it, including the bridge. It was an overcast day, which kept the sky from getting too bright, but that also meant those vibrant/ambiguous reds didn’t come through as strong.

If I’m honest, I barely noticed. There’s a reason this thing is a tourist destination, and it’s not solely because it’s red. It’s also absurdly large. We were about half a mile away, and even at that distance you begin to think it’s about to pull you into a gravity well. I was amazed there wasn’t a ring of iPhones, bucket hats, and binocular caps orbiting it like the rings of Saturn.

From that moment on, I made photographs that emphasized just how large the bridge was. The obvious decision from that point on was to compose in black and white. Color would have been a distraction.

A brief note on San Francisco: this city should not exist.

I had an incorrect mental image of this city before I visited. There was the bridge, that one pointy building, the fog, an impressive restaurant scene, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the tech companies, and some roads that were built on a singular hill, perhaps the same hill that one famous switchback road is on.

Now that I have visited, I can say with certainty that nothing in that city is as real as its geography and the anxiety produced by it. The entire city is hills. San Francisco doesn’t seem like it was “constructed”; that’s too perfunctory of a term to describe the layout. It is ingeniously and neurotically fastened to the side of a mountain. Concrete, bolts, and high-speed fiber optic cable keep it from sliding into the bay.

Walking around the city (which, I know, was my first mistake) is like stepping into a restaurant and discovering that every table is set inside one of those hanging cliff tents. The Maître d' points condescendingly at your “seat” while you try and scramble into it. You knock the salt and pepper into the sleeping bags, and you’re immediately spotted as the out-of-towner because you, like a stupid dumb idiot, didn’t grow up swinging between tents for langoustine with béchamel sauce.

In all seriousness, the city does seem like a pretty cool place. It’s fun to see a city that shouldn’t exist actually existing. Still, don’t interpret this as “visit” or “don’t visit”. I was only there for less than a day, so I can’t pretend to be the oracle who's able to interpret and articulate the city's history and culture. All I will say is, on a visual level, the city has personality. It’s engaged in a delicate but frenetic dance with the surrounding landscape.

I say dance on.

Thank you for your time.

Please consider subscribing for free to receive new content weekly. You can also support this newsletter through Patreon ($3/mo) or through the print store.