Looking Back, Seeing the Future: Photographer Janet Delaney’s Eye on South of Market

Looking Back, Seeing the Future: Photographer Janet Delaney’s Eye on South of Market
Friday Nov 6

For more than 40 years, fine art photographer Janet Delaney has chronicled change in the San Francisco neighborhood where she lived as a young woman and has been revisiting ever since.  Through her  photographs of the district now known as SOMA, its people, their surroundings and belongings, she has portrayed the transition from blacksmith shops and working-class diners to tech offices and sidewalk encampments. Now Delaney is in the process of sorting through and making sense of decades of work for a new book.  In conversation with Future Histories Lab creative director Susan Moffat, Delaney will talk about the meaning of a personal archive, the nature of time and seeing, and the history of a neighborhood that has become a Bay Area icon of gentrification and displacement. 

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Janet Delaney uses research, interviews and photography to record the untold stories of cities in transition. Her first project bore witness to the 1980s gentrification of a working-class neighborhood in San Francisco and was published as South of Market (MACK, 2013). In Public Matters (MACK, 2018), Delaney documented daily life as it unfolded alongside protests and parades in Reagan-era San Francisco. She is currently completing SoMA Now, a record of San Francisco’s rapid transformation into an international center of technology and all of the consequences these new riches have wrought. Both honest and poetic, her approach straddles the line between documentary and fine art.

Delaney is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She has received numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts grants. Her photographs are in collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Pilara Foundation, the Oakland Museum of California and the Smithsonian Museum, among others. She has shown her photographs nationally and internationally and is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco, California.

Delaney received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981. She has taught widely and held a faculty position in Visual Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for 15 years.