photo art page 22 san francisco

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New Galleries November 2008

A new gallery of atmospheric photo manipulation art using images of San Francisco from 2002.

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SAN FRANCISCO

This west coast city was founded as Yerba Buena by William Richardson in 1835, adjacent to an existing Spanish mission built in 1791. The bay area had once been home to various native peoples including the Tcholovoni and the Kule Loklo. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 was the primary cause of San Francisco's rapid elevation from a barely a town of 812 to a city of over 25,000 people by 1850.

The rapid growth and prosperity encouraged an influx of people from across the U.S. and the world, most significantly from Europe and Asia. The Chinese immigrants drawn by the gold (and later silver rush) found themselves driven out by greed and prejudice and instead became the key factor in the rapid construction of the transcontinental railroad, a crucial step in the development of modern America.

San Francisco's success and prosperity (continuing through various means to this day) is reflected by the many superb if sometimes eccentric Victorian buildings which still survive in many parts of the city despite the 1906 earthquake and later idiotic neglect up until the 1970's.

	*The Palace of Fine Arts* A magnificent neo-classical monument - the only survivor of a vast array of fantastical structures built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, a 'world's fair' on a 635 acre site celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal.


Two images of the enormous Panama-Pacific Exposition site with the spectacular array of buildings, promenades and gardens, dominated by the wonderfully eccentric Tower of Jewels. The Palace of Fine Arts site is located off of the left of the above image. If only more had been preserved.... Left: The Tower of Jewels

	Three variant images of the interior of the rotunda Other now long since demolished structures included a Turkish mosque and a Japanese Buddhist temple based on an original in Kyoto.

	The decorative panels and sculptures of the rotunda depict the defence of art against materialism (this was in the days before people would pay thousands for someone's unmade bed...) and the "melancholy of life without art" (or sometimes with it - once again, that bed).

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