Archive for: Photos

Peter E. Murphy
Open

The SS United States was the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship to cross the Atlantic. It served between 1952 and 1969 when cheap airfares made it redundant. Stripped to the guts, it is docked by the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia waiting to be scrapped, or with a billion-dollar investment, to be repurposed as a museum, hotel, or small city. ‘Open’ is from a series of photographs called Beautiful Decay taken onboard with an iPhone 6s on a sunny day in December 2017.

Open, Peter E. Murphy, photograph, 2017

Rink Foto
Harvey Milk Democratic Club Contingent/Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade

Critiqued as a gay activist masquerading as a journalist, Rink Foto has photographed San Francisco’s LGBT community since 1969. His photographs have been published in more than 40 books and in three Academy Award winning films. Below is a photo of the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club contingent in the 1982 Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day Parade. The Milk Club is named in memory of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay US politician, who was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, in November 1979.

Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club contingent, 1982 Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade, Rink Foto, photograph, 1982. L. to r. holding flags, Bryan R. Monte and Paul Melbostad; in car, San Francisco City and County Supervisor Harry Britt, US Congressman Phil Burton and driver, Bob Ross; under banner in jacket, John Bardis; far right, Ron Huberman.

Animals Close to Home
by Bryan R. Monte

Although he is best known as a writer and an editor, Bryan R. Monte has a photography collection which covers nearly 50 years. It includes not only photos of San Franciscan artists and writers such as Jerome Caja as a young boy scout and Steve Abbott as a middle-aged man, but also landscapes of the many places he has lived. Two of these landscapes include animals close to home. The first is of a wild deer in the Cleveland, Ohio Metroparks, less than two miles from Monte’s former family home. The second is of a parking lot in Holmes County, Ohio with a line of horse-drawn Amish buggies, within a short drive of his father’s birthplace.

Bryan R. Monte, Deer, Cleveland, Ohio Metroparks, photo, 2016

Bryan R. Monte, Amish Parking Lot, Holmes County, Ohio, photo, 2015

Harold Norse was a seminal figure in San Francisco’s poetry scene from the early 1970s to his death in 2009. In New York in the 1940s he befriended W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams. In the 1950s, he lived for five years in Italy. In the early 1960s, he worked with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs on his “cut-up” technique in Paris. He became engaged in the gay liberation scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s when he moved to San Francisco.

Norse’s most important books include Carnivorous Saints: Gay Poems 1941-1976 (Gay Sunshine Press, 1977), Beat Hotel, (Atticus Press, 1983), Memoirs of a Bastard Angel (William Morrow, 1989) and collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force, Collected Poems of Harold Norse 1934-2003, (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003).

Below are photos by Rink Foto and Bryan R. Monte which captured Norse in San Francisco at cafes and readings during the ’70 & ’80s.

Harold Norse 1916-2009. Photo © Rink Foto. All rights reserved.

Gay Writers at Café Flore, San Francisco, April 1984. Left to right: Jim Holmes, Harold Norse, Phil Willkie, Bryan R. Monte & Steve Abbott. Photo copyright © 1984 by Rink Foto. All rights reserved.

Five men at Café Flore, San Francisco, April 1984. Left to right: Phil Willkie, Jim Holmes, unidentified man, Steve Abbott and Harold Norse. Photo copyright © 1984 by Bryan R. Monte. All rights reserved.

No Apologies #2 Reading, Newspace, San Francisco, May 1984. Harold Norse, front, Steve Abbott, left front. Photo copyright © 1984 by Bryan R. Monte. All rights reserved.

Three Golden Gate Gardens
by Rink Foto

Rink Foto has photographed San Francisco since 1969. For AQ16’s theme of interiors, gardens, landscapes and music, he submitted photos of three gardens in Golden Gate Park. In the first photo below are views of the Academy of Sciences’ rooftop garden (background) and part of the garden in front of the Speckel’s Temple of Music. The second photo below is of the wooden entrance gate of the Japanese Tea Garden.

Academy of Sciences’ rooftop garden (background) and Spreckel’s Temple of Music Garden (foreground), © 2016 by Rink Foto, photograph, 2016

Entrance gate, Japanese Tea Garden, © 2016 by Rink Foto, photograph, 2016