Little Boxes, San Francisco, CA, 2024.
Little Boxes, San Francisco, CA, 2024.
Little Boxes, San Francisco, CA, 2024.
All the pixels, made of ticky-tacky, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54062971395/
#photography
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Captured with the Rodenstock 138mm/6.5 HR Digaron-SW lens (@ f/7.1), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50, 1/125 sec), Cambo WRS 1250 camera. Stitched panorama of two images, shifted left and right +/- about 18mm.
This view reminded me of Malvina Reynolds's famous 1962 song (though she was inspired by another San Francisco neighborhood - Daly City). If you look closely, the houses don't quite "all look just the same", but somehow, on the hillside there's more uniformity than there is up close.
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This is an image that works best at the highest resolution. The Rodenstock 138mm lens has extraordinary edge-to-edge sharpness and a general lack of distortion that makes it especially well suited to wide stitched panoramas like this one.
The effect is sort like Where's Waldo; the whole is shown mainly to invite you into the details.
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@mattblaze@federate.social It is interesting how distance and nearness change our perceptions of pattern, sameness, and difference.
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@heidilifeldman@mastodon.social Yeah, that really struck me when I looked out at the hillside.
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@mattblaze@federate.social @mattblaze@federate.social Black and white masks the limited range of pastel paints used on many of these houses, particularly in Daly City.
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@karlauerbach@sfba.social If you don't like my photo, you are free to make your own. I didn't steal the photons.
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@mattblaze@federate.social I love your photos; I wish I had your eye for images and framing, and your technical skill. And I'm a big fan of black and white.
It's just that in the case of these houses, the sameness is brought to a new qualitative realm by their limited color palette, a realm that speaks in a voice quite different from the uniformity of blue-and-white color of places like Santorini in Greece.
(One has to wonder why, so many decades after they were constructed, that so many of these houses remain in those few pastel hues.)
It's sort of like a those blanket-cloth long coats worn when Monty Python members would dress as women - black and white doesn't quite capture the flairless sameness that my eyes instantly noticed when we would go into a working district pub in England in the 1970s.
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@karlauerbach@sfba.social I think I'm seeing different things here. I'm seeing patterns of streets and shapes of houses, which I think jump out more clearly without the distraction of color.
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@mattblaze@federate.social I agree that black and white can show us things that are in front of our eyes but we do not see.
Lange's famous photo of a dust-bowl refugee woman and her children would have been transformed from a pained, desperate person into an entirely different thing, a Madonna, had it been in color.
I've gone into the Alabama Hills (near Lone Pine, California) where a large number of black and white films were made. I go to the various locations, get my eyes to see things from the camera's angles, and I'm distracted by the colors.
Imagine things like the opening scene of Woody Allen's film Manhattan done in color? No way.
The other night I re-watched the 1949 short film "Pacific 231" - the film's power would have been reduced had it been in color.
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@karlauerbach@sfba.social I've seen a carefully hand colorized version of Lange's Migrant Mother and it's amazing. It does the opposite of what I'd expect - it makes her accessible and immediate, and I saw her as more soft and vulnerable than in Lange's original, which made her look hardened by her circumstances.
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@karlauerbach@sfba.social (I'm not sure which version I PREFER, but they have very different impact.)
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@mattblaze@federate.social didn’t you though? We’ll never get those photons back.
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@karlauerbach @mattblaze
yes, Matt's image is a very different view than the hackneyed standard Daly City postcard. Which would be better rendered with an easel and pastels than Kodachrome anyway.Matt's use of digital B&W in the built-environment particularly is approaching a digital Ansel Adams for a new century.
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@n1vux @karlauerbach I should point out that this isn't the Daly City that Reynolds sang about, but rather University Mound, on the other side of the city, and built up at a different time and without a single developer.
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@n1vux@mastodon.radio @karlauerbach@sfba.social And, of course, Little Boxes isn't actually a song about architecture at all.
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@mattblaze@federate.social @n1vux@mastodon.radio @karlauerbach@sfba.social Honestly, all this makes me desperately curious to know the story behind Broadmoor remaining unincorporated despite being an enclave within Daly City.
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@mattblaze@federate.social @karlauerbach@sfba.social
Right on!
All art is about people,
only some of it obviously.Little boxes' social commentary may not be obvious upon first hearing, but the ?third? Verse attempts to apply clue-by-four.
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21 comments