Janet Delaney’s photographs capture the last moment when American neighborhoods were the essential nodes of a tight network of pluralistic local life that spilled into the streets.
The photographer Janet Delaney first came to San Francisco in 1967, for the Summer of Love. By the time she began living in the Mission, in the nineteen-eighties, she had learned Spanish and trained herself to recognize moments of quiet revelation in the streets. “I’ve always seen San Francisco as a small place where big things happen,” she says. “There’s a kind of freedom in being on the West Coast, as if your parents aren’t around.” She was an interloper in the Mission, not having been raised there. And yet, like many new arrivals, she found her place—and her subject—by studying the people for whom it was home.
San Francisco in the ’80s was a study in contrasts. As the shadows of gentrification began to creep over the heart of the city, just South of Market, the people of the Mission took to the streets to protest the policies coming out of the Reagan White Hous
Photographer Janet Delaney captured the city’s thriving public life – from parades and protests, to performances and beauty pageants – in the days before Silicon Valley.
Janet Delaney grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood in 1978, finding herself at the heart of an area populated with artists living in empty warehouses. A few blocks from her apartment was a massive construction site where the Moscone Center was being built. The construction, which necessitated the demolition of many buildings, caused many poor and elderly residents to be displaced. It turned out to be a catalyst in Delaney’s work—her photos of south of Market from that time are a visual history of a city in transition.
Delaney began taking photographs with a view camera. She initially shot construction sites near her apartment, including the vast Moscone convention center. “Since this twenty-acre site was in the middle of town, I began to wonder what had been bulldozed to make way for it,” she told me. “I climbed out of the construction pit and began to photograph my neighbors and the nearby small businesses.”
