The streets of San Francisco
This is also a music city. Performer Michelle Johnson sings here at a jazz poetry reading
San Francisco is one of the most influential cities in the world – an atmospheric place forever associated with the gold rush, gumshoe movies and Chinatown, beatniks and hippies, and more recently, the triumphs and excesses of Silicon Valley. Few photographers have a deeper knowledge of the city and its subcultures than Fred Lyon, a widely published documentary and portrait photographer who is still going strong at 93. Fred, who is more articulate and insightful than a lot of photographers half his age, has just released San Francisco Noir , a new collection of his classic black & white film images.
Moody night and low-light shots of the streets (and street life) of San Francisco dominate this fascinating chronicle of 1940 to 1960, at a time when very high ISOs or easily affordable and portable location lighting were something that Fred and his peers could
