Janet Delaney: South of Market
By Janet Delaney, Julian Cox, and Erin O’Toole
Janet Delaney: South of Market relates the complex history of a changing San Francisco neighborhood through a selection of photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. Janet Delaney photographed the people and places in the South of Market district, during a period when redevelopment was threatening to transform it irreversibly. This slow and deliberate photographic document testifies to the vitality of a vanished community of blue-collar workers, small-business owners, families, artists, and others.
Expanding upon the forty-five works included in the exhibition, this accompanying catalogue includes images from Delaney’s new series, which reexamines the neighborhood thirty-five years later. Collectively, these photographs offer a unique perspective for today’s readers, who themselves may be witnessing a new wave of gentrification in San Francisco.
Authors
Janet Delaney is a photographer and educator based in Berkeley, California. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and has shown her work nationally and internationally. For the last fourteen years she has been an adjunct lecturer in visual studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a visiting artist at SFAI.
Julian Cox is founding curator of photography and chief administrative curator at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. His publications for the museum include Real to Real: Photographs from the Traina Collection (2012); The Errand of the Eye: Photographs by Rose Mandel (2013); and Anthony Friedkin: The Gay Essay (2014).
Erin O’Toole is associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 2007. Most recently she collaborated with Leo Rubinfien and Sarah Greenough on the retrospective exhibition Garry Winogrand (2013).
