Seeing

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, just after the sun had poked its head out from behind the clouds overhead, I had a chat with London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, about the importance of artists to the spirit of a city. She was particularly interested in how creative people can capture the essence of a place and reflect it back to its residents.

The occasion for our conversation was the opening of a retrospective exhibit of images by photographers from a special edition of BIG magazine 20 years ago. I was part of the team that produced that issue, which contained snapshots in time of the city in 2004. Many of the artists included new images for this show, which produced a somewhat nostalgic, then-and-now impression on the visitors.

In her remarks, before a lively gathering of families and artists who had come out despite the rain, Breed discussed the work of the photographer David Johnson, who died recently at the age of 97. Among his many accomplishments, which included iconic civil rights movement photos, Johnson had chronicled life and jazz in the Fillmore District in the mid-20th century.

After her remarks, which were brief and refreshingly apolitical, Breed walked over to where I was sitting to introduce herself. She is young (49), black, and soft-spoken. She grew up in the housing projects that used to dot the Western Addition, including the Fillmore District before urban renewal displaced most of the black residents living there.

When Breed was born in the mid-1970s, roughly 13.5 percent of the residents were black; today that number is down to about 5 percent.

I mentioned her that I too had lived in the Fillmore in the 70s and worked at SunDance magazine and that I remember a number of black-owned businesses, notably a bar, Minnie’s Can-Do, at the corner of Fillmore and Pine. Local musicians played there all the time.

We compared notes for a while longer— she a young woman wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt; me an elderly man spinning tales of when I worked at Rolling Stone magazine — both feeling bittersweet about the past but hopeful about the future given the spirit of creativity all around us.

(The SF_retake exhibit is curated by Maren Levinson, David Peters and Rhonda Rubinstein, and will be at the Harvey Milk Center for the next few weeks. Mary Spicer and Marc Weidenbaum were also part of the core BIG team and the planning for the exhibit.)

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