Hiromi Oda and Kieran Ridge set out to photograph the world, and they found it in San Francisco.
“Honestly, what we feel when we look at San Francisco — and this is a trite phrase, but it’s true — is that we’re seeing the ‘global village,’” Ridge explains. “The first thing that struck us when we arrived in 1991 was the number of immigrants here. The Bay Area is a nexus of America and the rest of the world, a model of what the world will be.”
The world as they see it is on view in the San Francisco Public Library’s Jewett Gallery through July 25. The exhibit, Street Festivals of San Francisco, documents 13 of the city’s community celebrations, including Chinese New Year, Juneteenth, El dia de los muertos and Sakura Matsuri. The photographs are part of a body of more than 30,000 digital images the couple made over the past four years, all shot from ground level, all focused on streets, neighborhoods and people nearly unknown to tourists.
In the city’s public image of winding streets, bay bridges and cable cars, “Where is the funky energy, the cheeky smile, the pierced eyebrow, the polyglot tongue that make up the true face of San Francisco — the San Francisco that people see, hear, smell, taste and touch when they really live here (whether for a day or a lifetime)?” they ask on their website, www.thestreetsofsanfrancisco.com.
Their photos in the library exhibit depict public festivity, but Ridge and Oda capture the intimacy of events that are more private ritual than tourist attraction. Carefully researched text accompanying the photos underscores that even the oldest street festivals, such as the Chinese New Year and St. Patrick’s Day parades, were established as a mark of identity by those who came west in search of opportunity and freedom.
Their lens frames a boy in Kelly green, chewing on an empty corncob pipe; the tattooed muscles of a mikoshi-carrier in the Cherry Blossom Parade; the exuberant grins of gay lovers; the naked buns of freezing dancers at Carnaval; and a glittering Chinese New Year dragon sweeping by in an undulating blur, tracing a connection to culture for generations of Asian Pacific Americans who have never seen Asia.
That Asian faces appear frequently in pictures of each of these festivals illustrates how embedded in Bay Area culture APAs have become. There’s the woman standing watchfully behind pint-size dancers in the St. Paddy’s parade. A couple who raises their fists before the “Queer Asian Chicks” placard at the Dyke March. And Gay Pride, young Filipino men, who dance in hot pink halter tops, their heads and shoulders rising from a circle of lacy fans like stamen from a hothouse flower.
“It would be unusual to have 20 photos without an Asian Pacific American in any of them,” Ridge acknowledges. “We didn’t set out to document an Asian presence, but we didn’t cover it up, either. Of course, every neighborhood we went to had everyone else in it as well. You see homeless people in every section, for example.
“Sometimes people have asked us: ‘What is that person doing at that festival?’ That simply shows that San Francisco definitely is at a crossroads, an indication of the way the world is moving. One reason we decided to photograph street culture is because there’s a certain tolerance. There’s no majority race in California, and that’s reflected here. To see gay couples or interracial couples, for example — no one’s noticing or reacting to those things as differences.”
A point of pride for the photographers is their photography award from AsianWeek in 2000 for their portrait of an Afro-Japanese family in Nihonmachi.
Ridge, who acts as a de facto spokesman for the team simply due to his comfort with spoken English, grew up in Ireland and spent time in Australia before heading to the United States, where he teaches journalism and film at Marin School in Sausalito.
“I was fascinated by the fact people who would be my peers were doing far more interesting things in America than I could in Australia,” he says. “The U.S. is, for better or worse, a point of leverage for what goes on in the world. I wanted to get closer to the empire of our time, to analyze the mechanics of American society.”
Oda, who’s more reticent, preferring to let her camera do the talking, is from Sendai, Japan, where she was a representative for a liquor distribution company. “I was carrying cases of Johnny Walker while wearing high heels,” she says. Women, even white-collar professionals, must retain an aura of femininity in Japan, she notes. The presence of women in San Francisco’s Sakura Matsuri, pounding on taiko drums and lifting the mikoshi shrine along with the men, is “a very sansei thing to do,” she says, smiling.
Both photographers were struck by the ways in which tradition has been translated into a distinctly American language. “In Japan, we feel that when we go to other places we should follow their system,” Oda says. “So it’s interesting the way Japanese Americans have taken things like the mikoshi festival and made it their way. It’s very dynamic.”
“If you look, you notice maybe the fundashi is crooked or the shamrock is plastic,” Ridge adds. “But what’s important is not what’s authentic, but that America is a repository of culture that is lost, for instance, in Ireland. In some cases, you see elements of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations from here being adopted in Ireland. It’s a conversation, an example of the way America talks to the rest of the world.”
The couple’s working style is as inclusive as their photographic philosophy. “We’re looking for balance on both sides of the camera,” says Ridge. “We share dual credit for every photograph, because the person who presses the button isn’t the sole author of the art. There are times when I’m taking a shot and I feel Hiromi’s finger pressing the shutter at the same moment, that’s how tangible her influence is. There are many pictures which neither of us can remember who took it.”
Street Festivals of San Francisco
On view through July 25
The Jewett Gallery,
San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco
The exhibit is an official event of the Japan-US 150th Anniversary celebrations.
Other events at the library include:
6-8 p.m. June 16
Literature of the San Francisco Neighborhoods, a panel of San Francisco authors including Michelle Tea,
Genny Lim, Rebecca Solnit, Resureccion Cruz and Kevin Killian.
6:30-8 p.m. July 1
History of the San Francisco Street Festivals, a forum with representatives from Nihonmachi and other neighborhoods.
