Omniar SFO

SF in photos and words

There are many San Francisco-focused photo blogs, but two in particular do a great job of combining words and images.  

“I live here” is a series by Julie Michelle that dives into the lives and personalities of a variety of San Francisco characters.  Julie takes the photos, but she asks her subjects to write about themselves and how they experience the city.  

 

Ramsey, the author of fogbay (no longer updated), takes a somewhat different approach, focusing on smaller bit-size slices of visual awesomeness.  Each is accompanied by a short description, story, or essay to add a bit of depth

Both bloggers do a great job of juxtaposing the things that make their human subjects interesting with the things that make San Francisco, well, San Francisco. After all, a place isn’t just people and it’s certainly not just a physical environment. This is just a wild guess, but it’s probably both.

Maps that reveal

Eric Fischer has created some fascinating maps that expose aspects of San Francisco (and many other cities) that are otherwise latent or ignored.  

The first map (click for link to full version) shows the geographic concentration of flickr photos taken by tourists (red), locals (blue) and uncertain (yellow).  The actual map data comes from openstreemap.   

Perhaps even more striking is this map below showing racial and ethic distribution using data from the 2000 census.  Here Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people.  Well known ethnic enclaves like China Town and the Mission are clearly discernable, as well as other areas with strong ethnic and racial concentrations like Bayview, Hunter’s Point, and Oakland.  

Eric’s maps are actually quite beautiful, but they’re also challenging (in a good way).  A map, it turns out, is an incredibly blunt instrument for representing reality.  Perhaps that’s part of what makes them so effective in yanking us out of our everyday human experience to see a bigger picture.  That’s not to say that we don’t already experience San Francisco in terms of “touristy or not,” or “asian,” or “black,” or “white.”  We do.  The point is that because they’re basic categories of how we divide and and delineate places, we often forget that we’re doing it at all.  Maps like these help remind us of that, and also help to expose the underlying realities that lead to our experience in the first place.