In 2005, when I began research for my novel The Story of a Marriage, which takes place in the 1950s, I did not yet know in which part of San Francisco it would be set. I wanted a part of town obscure enough to the reader that it would feel fresh (and allow me my own inventions) yet still able to evoke the grandeur and beauty of my adopted city.
I picked the Sunset neighbourhood: the westernmost stretch of the city below Golden Gate Park. It seemed to me untouched either by “hipster” gentrification, the recent dotcom boom-and-bust or in fact the passage of history itself. I could walk the streets and still “see” what my characters once saw. I could travel in time with them.
It does not surprise me, therefore, that Joshua Amirthasingh’s photographic series Tales from the City, its name inspired by Armistead Maupin’s novels of 1970s San Francisco and onwards, shares nearly the same setting. The photos capture San Francisco’s old buildings and parks in sunlight and fog, both homes and palm trees, vintage cars and crashing waves, monuments and glittering wetlands — but hardly any people. You can make out a surfer in deep fog, a neon-lit walker on a rainy night, hikers and distant forms. But they are part of the scenery, and part of the romance Amirthasingh and I share with San Francisco: one can imagine being that person in the fog, by the shore, on the pier.
