Psychedelic San Francisco

I became interested in photography during my first Winter break back from college. I scoured Facebook Marketplace until I stumbled upon what seemed like a good deal on a Canon PowerShot ELPH 350 HS. After doing some more research, I realized it really was a good deal and I took the leap of faith. This was my first camera that wasn’t attached to the metallic bricks that are our cell phones. My mom teased my generation for our infatuation with digital cameras, but I was undeterred. That camera served me well until that following summer when I accidentally flung the camera into the pit of a fire that my friends and I were roasting marshmallows over at the beach. Only the SD card was salvageable. Yet, I continued to experiment with photography, searching for shots that I like, originally boiling my process down to what simply felt right. I inherited a couple of cameras from my grandpa and upgraded to my current rig, thank you Facebook Marketplace, one summer ago while trying to learn more about composition along the way.

When this project came up and I realized I would have the chance to stray away from a fully written project, I immediately gravitated towards photography. I was also growing increasingly homesick as the semester came to an end, so I thought what better way is there to enjoy my time back home, productively, than to go to my favorite spots in the city, while meticulously searching for cohesive shots that would help articulate my goals in this project. Ultimately, I set out to do just that. I researched certain techniques I wanted to try out, notably long exposure shots and homemade lens filter options, as well as certain locations that I knew I would need to include to imbue my project with psychedelic credibility. I polished my lenses, fastened cellophane to a lens hood with rubber bands and set out for San Francisco. For years, my favorite neighborhood in San Francisco has been Haight-Ashbury. I always enjoyed digging through racks of clothes in the dozens of thrift stores in the area or grabbing a pesto slice from Escape from New York pizza. Stopping into Amoeba was always a vibrant conversation piece with friends, and the skatepark's mellow flatground vibe is perfect for my style of skating. Yet, in all of the years I had been going, I had never once gone for the sole purpose of photography. In fact, I had never gone anywhere with the sole purpose of photography. This project presented me with a unique and irresistible opportunity to do just that.

Photography, as a medium, is notoriously separate from psychedelia. If the pinnacle of photographic technology is to capture and preserve and the epitome of psychedelia is to distort and transform, the two fields become disjointed. It is a contradiction to attempt a psychedelic photography project. I thought back to Huxley’s infamous The Doors of Perception, a piece that we, in class, have discussed over again and his concept of the reducing valve. (Huxley) The camera in a sense is a reducing valve as it puts a limit upon what can be captured. There is a limit to the colors or pixels that can be registered and transported as a digital file to our phones or laptops, and with every transportation, quality is only reduced. To counteract this preservation and reducing valve, I was curious to explore possibilities using lens filters. However, I do not own a single lens filter and I was unsure if I would be able to find something that may create my desired dreamy effect. I thought of layering a translucent layer on top directly distorting the image that my camera’s sensor would take in. In my effort to manipulate the reducing valve that was my camera, I arrived at wrapping both new and scratched cellophane over my lens, fastening my rig with a bundle of rubber bands. The resulting picture is cloudy with light leaking in from unexpected angles; dust particles trapped in between the layered cellophane also distorted my camera’s autofocus causing the fuzziness present in the photos I shot while using this lens.

While I was ideating and finding shots for the project, I was not solely thinking about the engineering of the photos using my camera, glued to its mini screen and viewfinder. I was looking around me trying to see what psychedelia means in what was once the psychedelic hotspot of the world and the heart of the hippie movement. I was trying to observe how it changed and stayed the same. At times, I was pessimistic, looking at the tacky commodification of the flower power motif or rainbow tie-dye colors. The Hendrix house, where Jimi never lived, capitalized upon by misleading tour guides, the clock frozen on 4:20 on the corner of Haight and Ashbury right outside a gift shop called Haight & Ashbury, the Grateful Dead house that was evacuated by the band after less than two years as the neighborhood became overrun, and the hippie store brandishing flower and rainbow motifs are all relics of an authentic past turned commercial. These landmarks are businesses or sights to see instead of open houses that nurture the Haight’s once thriving, communal neighborhood culture. Atop Hippie Hill, towering cranes and Sutro tower are seen dwarfing onlookers below, undeniable stamps of urban development and the gentrification that is slowly rinsing out San Francisco as average home purchase and apartment rental prices surpass $1.5M and $3K respectively. Now, the same people that are disrupting the deep-rooted San Francisco community are invading its native psychedelic culture as ‘tech bros’ grow increasingly infatuated with spiritual tourism, hallucinogens and nootropics. (Lovato) Revisiting Ido Hartogsohn’s piece American Trip, set and setting is reestablished as a foundation of psychedelic discourse. Applying this concept to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and broader city of San Francisco spanning across a multi-decade trip that is the transformation of the city from the Summer of Love to present day, the setting may remain the same geographically, but the collective set and setting is entirely different. Hartogsohn goes on to emphasize how “all of the most important variables of set and setting are determined by collective factors.” (Hartogsohn) As a collective, the Haight-Ashbury and San Francisco that I traversed is completely different from the communal utopia that it seemed to be prior to 1970. It seems to be a shell of what it once was.

However, in my cynical daze, peaks of hope shone through, providing indisputable evidence of the living, breathing vitality of San Francisco psychedelia. The outspoken signs in the windows at Hendrix house promoting notions of interconnectedness and a universal ‘one’ that we all embody; the anti-hate and pro-democracy messaging in those same signs and the hearts outside the hippie shop that curses out government corruption; the joyous murals building off of each other one emphasizing love’s power over love for power and the other urging the viewer to listen; and the impromptu concert that I and many onlookers alike strolled across all suggest the city’s rebelliousness, passion, and community are here to stay. Revisiting my original question: What is Psychedelic San Francisco? Maybe it is the hearts outside a hippie shop carrying names of psychedelic figures Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna or cries for peace and democracy, or maybe it is the ensemble of friends laying down rhythmic beats and dancing with torn bedsheets in the fields of Hippie Hill just outside Golden Gate Park. Maybe it is the dead letters in the neon sign marking a storefront’s everlasting pride: “Amoeba Music.” Maybe it is something yet to come or far gone. Maybe it’s none of these at all or all at the same time. After my single day excursion, all I know is that its spirit is alive and well.

Post Production

This final project is the culmination of many pleasant surprises that came during this semester. For starters, I never thought that I would take a university course on psychedelics, or even see one be offered in the first place. Moreover, I never thought that I would put this much deliberate effort into a photography project, not to mention coding an entire website for it. After hours of wandering the streets of San Francisco, taking hundreds of photos, and more hours at home trying to piece this website together, I have a newfound appreciation for engaging in the production of creative processes. Not only do I have an appreciation for creating, I have a newfound itch to create. I plan to further my exploration of photography, and I hope to soon start learning about videography and other means of content creation. I am beyond grateful for this course and project, and I am excited to find the next chance to apply what they have taught me.