Page 206 - Castro to Christopher Street

206 women.
Photographer’s Statement
In 1974 I dropped out of high school in New York City and hit the road. Fifteen months later, after hitchhiking as far as Buenos Aires, I landed in San Francisco where I joined my brother in a small arts commune basking in the afterglow of the hippie movement.
I was carrying Ad Reinhardt’s Leica rangefinder camera, lent to me by his daughter, Anna, who I knew in high school, when I had taken a few photography classes.
Pretty soon I was cruising around photographing with a photographer friend of my brother name Larry Bair, who owned a car, and sitting in on classes with Hank Wessel at the San Francisco Art Institute.
We photographed throughout the San Francisco Bay area, and even as far afield as Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, California. I quickly learned the technique of pre focusing the camera and smoothly photographing a subject to keep the action as candid and fluid as possible. No focusing and fiddling with a zoom lens.
As a teenager I had been influenced by Cartier-Bresson’s book “The Decisive Moment,” and now studying with Hank and Larry I was learning a technique that involved softly focusing my eyes so I could observe everything around me and then photographing with a 28 or 35mm lens because that had a very similar field of view as the human eye. Photographing became about observing: light, people and the environment. Then in the darkroom it became about seeing how 3 dimensional reality changed when converted into a two dimensional image.
In San Francisco the gay scene was unfolding around me. My first Halloween parade was on Polk Street, and a definite eye opener. I had never witnessed anything similar in New York. Around that time my brother Doniphan was making a movie called Sammy Delirium and recruited a couple of transvestites to act in a scene with me. Interestingly when the movie was screened the trans looked so good everyone thought they were