Today from our partners at Art Practical we bring you a review of Janet Delaney’s photographs, on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through July 19, 2015. Author Glen Helfand explains that the power of these images lies not just in themselves: “Delaney’s exhibition becomes a social space for the exchange of memory and the erratic flow of time in the city, and a means of marking its effects.” This article was originally published on February 19, 2015.

Janet Delaney. Bulk Natural Foods, Russ at Howard Street, 1980; archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Artist. © 2014 Janet Delaney.

In San Francisco, in 2015, it’s impossible to avoid conversations about the city’s massive sense of remaking. Depending on your history with the place, these discussions might be nostalgic laments, activist rants about gentrification, visionary business plans, or some combination thereof. There are those who remember what once occupied a site, be it a single-screen movie theater, legendary sex club, SRO, or social-service agency. Others see opportunities for real-estate development, artisanal restaurants, or, hopefully, some kind of visionary new urbanism.

This phenomenon of rapid change comes with rich social, emotional, and aesthetic implications, all of which are evident in Janet Delaney’s South of Market photographs, a series that documents a shift in the South of Market neighborhood during the late 1970s and early 1980s. To show these photographs, which track architectural and demographic change, at the de Young Museum at this moment is a no-brainer. Construction cranes are currently punctuating the same SoMa streets that Delaney shot decades ago, making this the perfect moment for looking at these now-historic images of industrial spaces, gay bars, cheap apartments, and artist studios. SoMa, at that time, was the sister neighborhood to New York’s then-seedy, artist-filled East Village—both have become pricy enclaves in the subsequent decades.

Read the full article here.