Dignity Never Been Photographed 008

San Francisco, 2024

Welcome back to Dignity Never Been Photographed, a series in which I discuss a meaningful photograph I’ve taken

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I took this photo last September at Pier 39 here in San Francisco.

I was down along the bay with my wife and her family for Muni Heritage Weekend, when they offer free rides on all the old buses and trolleys. Old transit infrastructure is one of the great features of San Francisco: cable cars, tram lines, ferries—real things that the city really depended on at one point. Today they’re mostly tourist attractions, but it’s all still there, still running the way it did when it was built, more or less. There’s something to be said for that.

We took a trolley down the Embarcadero from the Railway Museum to the Fisherman’s Wharf area, where they booted us off into the crowd of Bubba Gump patrons. We wandered into Pier 39 so my nieces could see the sea lions. I excused myself to use the restroom, which was hidden away on the northeastern end of the second floor. Before I walked in, I glanced to my life and saw this: the edge of the complex, a little marina, the warehouses of Pier 35, and beyond that, the bay and the Bay Bridge. I lined up this shot and fired and went about my business.

I like this photo because of its sense of distance. As a younger man, I was obsessed with low depth of field images: a tiny slice of hypersharp subject adrift in a sea of soft, gauzy shapelessness. There is an instant drama to these kinds of pictures. They’re clearly different, something other than the lifeless, immaculate images produced by an iPhone. Even the best “Portrait Mode” photo looks artificial and unsatisfying compared to an image shot at ƒ/1.8.

As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve learned to love the other end of the f-stop spectrum: ƒ/8, ƒ/16—hell, even ƒ/22. Images shot at a high aperture must speak for themselves, stand on their own fundamental quality. There’s no shortcut to the wow factor. It’s all in the framing, the composition, the colors; in other words, in being a good photographer.

I’m not sure I’m a good photographer, but I’m pretty sure this is a good photograph. I like the way the eye is drawn gradually from near to far, from the edge of the complex at the bottom of the image along the docked boats on the left, then to the warehouse on right, and finally to the tower of the Bay Bridge in the center of the frame. The tower is a little hard to see, the product of a thin wash of haze that day and slight over-exposure. This reinforces the sense of distance, making it clear that many miles have been collapsed into a single two-dimensional image.

I like the many blues that make up most of the photo, too: the moody blue of the marina, the tealy blue of the bay, and the light, warm blue of the sky above. It really captures the wondrous, rushing feeling of standing along the San Francisco Bay looking east on a bright, sunny day. Sometimes, when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and the salt breeze strikes you in just such a way, I think there is no more beautiful place on the planet. This image seems to agree.

I also like what you see in the photo. Almost everything in the image is man-made—bridge, pier, boats—yet there isn’t a single human being in sight. There’s a pleasant, mild irony to that fact. It feels a bit sinister, like a glimpse of a future that doesn’t include us. Sooner or later, that’s coming.