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By conservative estimates, tourists have snapped over two billion photographs of San Francisco - one-plus picture for every square foot of land within the city limits. The lion's share of this activity has accumulated at a handful of photogenic spots, where within a stone's throw of each, cameras have clicked more than one million times!
As an artistic greenhorn, cutting my compositional teeth on San Francisco's landmarks, these ghostly mountains of photographic effort weighed palpably upon me. The judicious application of creative energy should yield unique results! Or so I'd believed. However, at a million photo spot, for decades casting off camera shots like neutrons from a block of uranium, the singular seemed a chimera. Deep in my mind, unspoken doubts writhed serpentine.
One seminal summer evening found me at a universally-beloved Golden Gate Bridge overlook. The trademark fog had absconded with the view, and I sat alone, pricked by dots of cold drizzle, pondering retreat. Heralded by crunching gravel, a man and his grown son emerged from the murk, exchanged a few words in a foreign tongue, and proceeded to bluff's edge. After a short pause, a brilliant camera flash broadcast into the mist. Having perfectly captured the impenetrable blankness of the situation, the pair contentedly retraced their steps into the fog.
In a few stunning seconds, the old man and his son peeled open my eyes and telegraphed the answers that I had long searched for.
Tourist is an ongoing series of scenic photographs, available as limited edition prints, taken near places where you might regularly find a visitor to San Francisco. See each photograph for a map and geographic coordinates of the spot from which it originated.
Click on a thumbnail above for more information about a particular photograph.