love affair with San Francisco now a book (photography)

I think I might need to own this book -

LINK to SF Chronicle article



St. Patrick's Day at the Buena Vista, 1953
photo by Gene Wright
I didn't get there until the early 70's, but remember the BV well....


Gene Wright, by Gene Wright.

There are more photos with the article, see Link above.



Fog. Bridges. Cable cars. Gene Wright's panoramic love affair with San Francisco is now a book
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2006


Jay Blakesberg, a San Francisco book publisher who photographs rock musicians for a living, had never heard of Gene Wright until he read his obituary in The Chronicle the day before Christmas 2004.

Intrigued by writer Michael Taylor's description of the martini-sipping North Beach photographer whose wide-angle pictures revel in the foggy romance of San Francisco, Blakesberg searched the Web in vain for Wright's images. He wanted to know more about this elegant man in black who spent a half century documenting the flavor and changing forms of the city he adored -- the vanishing alleys and rising Transamerica Pyramid, cable cars that seem to float in space, plunging streets, fog-shrouded bridges, Italian barbershop singers and beret-wearing Beats.

"This guy sounded interesting,'' said Blakesberg. He tracked down Wright's widow, Liz, and eventually looked at thousands of Wright's panoramic black-and-white images. About 150 of them are featured in "San Francisco Love Affair: A Photographic Romance -- Gene Wright Images, 1949-2000,'' recently published by Blakesberg's Rock Out Books.

"It really intrigued me that this guy had the guts in the 1950s and '60s to go out with these unique panoramic cameras, which are semi-unpredictable, and shoot commercial jobs,'' Blakesberg said in his South of Market studio the other day. He was impressed by the formal strength, clarity and invention of Wright's pictures, their tonal richness and historical value. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, quoted on the book jacket, calls them "classic images of a twentieth-century San Francisco (that is receding from us as through the wrong end of a telescope).''

Wright brought the same curious eye and skill to all his work, whether he was doing jobs for the United Way and KSFO radio, portraits or sweeping views of the cityscape and bay. He loved to wander the hills, photographing whatever caught his eye or making notes to return to a spot at sunrise, or when the fog appeared, to make a picture he'd envisioned.

"Gene had a love for this city and always felt you can discover here,'' said Liz Wright, a legal secretary who met the dapper photographer in 1970 at his studio on upper Grant Avenue, where the photographer welcomed clients and passers-by with a glass of wine or a vodka martini.

"He was always excited about going out with a camera. He was always seeing things differently,'' added Wright, who often accompanied her husband on his jaunts around town. "Sometimes he'd say, 'We really need better clouds,' or 'we need the moon' or 'we need more fog.' He would plan the pictures,'' like the multiple-exposure image of Coit Tower with eight moons rising diagonally from the Telegraph Hill landmark. He'd seen it in his mind's eye the year before and waited for the right night to shoot the image from Russian Hill.

Wright, proclaimed a "living legend'' by the Board of Supervisors in 2002, was smitten by San Francisco when he arrived from Utah in 1949 to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He'd grown up in Ogden, where the gold spike marking the completion of the transcontinental railway was hammered in 1869. Wright said he was conceived while his parents were in San Francisco for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and grew up on his mother's tales of the roguish city by the bay. He spent his lunch money going to the movies. The flickering images he saw in the dark inspired him to become a photographer. As a Utah newspaperman, he photographed car wrecks, politicians and crime scenes.

His other passion was flying. He hung out at the Ogden airstrip, where as a teenager he was taught to fly by actor Wallace Beery, who had a girlfriend in town. For cleaning Beery's plane, Wright got flying lessons. He received $50 for a picture of a horse he took from the air -- the first of countless prints he would sell in his productive career (at one point, he had shops at the Cannery and in Carmel).

"That was a lot of money in the Depression,'' Liz Wright said.

"I only got $7.50 for my first picture,'' laughed Blakesberg, known for his portraits of the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, Tom Waits and other musicians.

During World War II, Wright photographed prisoners of war detained in Utah -- the War Department used them to show enemy governments that their soldiers were not maltreated -- and the wives and girlfriends of Americans fighting overseas. He photographed them in the bathing-suit pinup style of the Betty Grable pictures prized by lonely GIs.

Wright began experimenting with wide-angle cameras in the early 1950s and continued making 140-degree images the rest of his life. At the time, panoramic cameras were used primarily to make group portraits like banquet pictures. Wright was among the first to make art with them.

He set up his studio at 1412 Grant Ave. in 1951, his headquarters until high rent finally forced him out in 1985. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard, the walls covered with Wright's black-and-white photographs. He favored all-black attire, and with his trim mustache and lean good looks, looked a little like the master of San Francisco noir, Dashiell Hammett.

"I always said he looked like a movie star,'' said Liz Wright, who moved here from Jackson, Miss., in '69 and made the photographer's acquaintance a few months later. She was going on a date with a guy named Sam, and while he was parking the car, she went into Wright's studio to fetch a friend who'd hired the photographer to take her wedding pictures. Wright gave Liz her first martini, and then a second. They were sitting on his red couch talking like old friends when a car horn started honking. She'd forgotten about her date. Wright escorted both women outside and told the man behind the wheel that they'd had too much to drink and needed a ride home.

"That was the last date I had with Sam, but it was the beginning of a wonderful relationship with Gene,'' Wright said. He surprised her on their first date by driving her to the Oakland Airport. He took her flying in his plane, up to the old Nut Tree in Vacaville for lunch. She became his wife, partner and occasional subject.

"Before he'd photograph me he'd say, 'Have a glass of wine, honey.' So I'd have a glass of wine. And it really does relax you,'' Wright said with a smile.

Her husband, who admired the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon, was the go-to guy for aspiring San Francisco models putting together their portfolios, and he became known for photographing women as well as street scenes (the nudes were left out of the book). He told The Chronicle in 1963: "I won't photograph a woman unless she sits down with me and has one or two martinis beforehand. A martini is a great equalizer. It bring the woman closer to me, establishes a rapport and helps the woman to shed her inhibitions, revealing her true self.''

Wright was highly self-critical, tearing up a lot of prints that didn't meet his standards. He insisted on printing everything himself.

"He wouldn't let anybody else print his negatives,'' Blakesberg said. "He'd spend days and days in the darkroom printing all the pictures, like the fog on the Golden Gate Bridge, and bring them down to Liz at the gallery. They sold for $15 a pop. Over the course of a weekend, they'd all be gone.''

Wright's work was technically brilliant, said Blakesberg, who took pains to retain all the details of light and shadow while scanning and printing the images using contemporary digital methods. Because of the new technology, "we're probably able to bring stuff out of these negatives that Gene was probably never able to bring out in the darkroom.''

A few days before he died of pneumonia at 88, Wright summed up his thoughts and feelings for his wife. His only regret was not publishing his collected works. His wife assured him she'd make it happen. Blakesberg's call a few weeks later felt like fate.

"Getting to see Gene's work come together in a book, to keep my promise, is just wonderful,'' she said.

E-mail Jesse Hamlin at [email protected].