Joseph Selle was a commercial photographer in the Union Square area of San Francisco for forty years, from the 30s to the 70s. He took candid snapshots of pedestrians and then sold the portraits by mail for fifty cents each. When he retired his entire archive--totaling some one million images--went to Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Now, due to digital technology, a small selection of this vast body of work is available. It is an enormously moving experience of time travel to "walk" the streets along with Selle and see our parents and grandparents or younger selves on display. Curated with the cooperation of VSW archivist Andrew Eskind, this preliminary exhibition will include video projection of thousands of images.

Joseph Selle: Curatorial Reflections

I distinctly remember a tall older man haunting Union Square in the early 70s, offering to sell pedestrians their photographic portraits. After more than three decades I still remember him for some reason: perhaps it was his height, his odd outfit of a taxi driver’s hat and long duster. It is a supreme coincidence that after all this time I have come to work with Joseph Selle’s lifetime accumulated archive.

Viewing these images is an overwhelming emotional experience. After a session editing the photographs, one is unlikely to ever walk the city streets in quite the same way, because an awareness of the lives that once occupied these same sidewalks becomes unshakable. The Selle archive is as close as we will ever come to the experience of time travel, experiencing the streets of San Francisco half a century ago. Truly a memento mori, we encounter vibrantly alive people in the midst of their quotidian lives, people whom we infer are now long dead, while the children displayed are themselves entering late middle age. I don’t believe I have ever understood both the tragedy and dignity of life as viscerally as I have while immersed in this project.

It is fascinating and moving to see how people organize themselves, create structure, within such a simple act as walking down the street. Mothers and grandmothers hold children’s hands. Adult children support their aged parents. Women friends walk side by side, talking, touching. Couples and families align themselves with each other, to other pedestrians, and to the architecture. Vehicle traffic and crowding causes odd behavior and balletic moves.

This is to some extent an anthropological experience, as we see that a trip downtown to Union Square, even well into the 1960s, was an occasion for wearing one’s best clothing. Women inevitably wear white gloves and hats, and almost never wear slacks. Fox stoles and mink coats abound. Men wear suits and ties, and hats. Everyone smokes. Everyone shops. Everyone’s clean. Just blocks away on Market Street, we discover more people of color and more casually dressed people, especially as the 50s move along into the 60s. Taken at the end of the baby boom, the pictures include many more pregnant women than we are used to seeing on the streets today. Men smoke pipes.

People are faced with a behavioral choice if they see someone like Selle about to approach them on the street. Most ignore him if they notice him at all, but once they realize what he is up to, and that he’s harmless, often give themselves away by touching their hair or putting their best foot forward. Quite a few put their hands up to signal stop; many others laugh at being caught unaware.

History is lurking in the shadows of every photograph. In the 50s material one can detect the impact of Mamie Eisenhower’s conservative style on the women, and then suddenly just a few months later, Jackie Kennedy’s more chic approach is seen everywhere. We see an elderly man wearing a Kennedy straw hat during the election campaign. Then one evening on Market Street we see people carrying newspapers under their arms with the enormous banner headline: “….SLAIN!” and we can painfully infer that it marks the assassination of the President. Among the well-dressed people streaming by the photographer’s lens are a great number African American and Asian American people, and even a significant number of mixed-race couples; more occasionally we see Latinos, or a hipster in jeans or leather, or out gay people. San Francisco’s particular character was already apparently well on its way to being established.

Organizing the archive places the curator into several vexing dilemmas. These images have been captured for four decades like genies in a bottle, waiting to be released. Selecting a few of them for this catalogue feels like a betrayal to all the other lives glimpsed and not included that will now recede back into obscurity forever. Selecting a tiny number of these works to represent the whole is a daunting curatorial task. Arguably, to be most true to the archive one should allow chance to determine the selection: the richness of this work is the profound beauty of its ordinariness. As curator I am drawn to the most artfully or quirkily framed shots. I am tempted to disregard the great majority of the pictures that are out of focus. As historian one could cull the 18,000 images for important moments. As anthropologist there is the opportunity to represent the entire population: the wealthy, the middle class, the working class, all the racial backgrounds, the clothing, lifestyles and eccentricities of the culture. I have tried to represent all these approaches as best I can; a book many times the size of this catalogue is called for.

The territory of museums has widened over the past decade to include more and more consideration of visual materials made by non-artists that nonetheless reflect skill, style, meaning and power. The street vendor work of Joseph Selle is just at the brink of being appreciated in that same way and it is a thrill and a privilege to participate in that rediscovery. This project could not have happened without the energy and dedication of Andrew Eskind of Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. Eskind has taken on the pursuit of information about Selle with the precision of a private eye and the dedicated professionalism of the historian he truly is. I offer my humble thanks to him for bringing this project to me, enabling the Nelson Gallery to share it with the UC Davis community.

Renny Pritikin
Davis, California
February 2005