The Most Funkadelic “San Francisco Street Art Thumbnails Gallery” In The World!

Thinking about how to organize my photographs of street art in San Francisco into a coherent web site lead me to the obvious; organize by location.

The City features numerous “locations” with many more sub-locations spread out… for example, the Mission District includes many key sub-locations such as:

Balmy, Clarion Alley, West of Mission & 24^th Street, Lilac, Bryant at 18^th, Florida at 17^th, and so on. These are complete and individual street-canvas-locations where street artists leave their mark on the world.

Some of these are obvious, and others would surprise you. So far the site includes 17 sub-location galleries in the Mission District alone. And I’m not done yet.

Eventually I wanted to also provide the option of seeing work organized by the artists’ names, and that’s part of the discussion right now behind the scenes at Graffiti SF Dot Com Headquarters. I always found this feature of SF Mural Arts an attractive one. Of course, you have to know the artist’s name to start off, and I don’t always know this until much later.

Seeing how I photograph the same artist’s work at the various locations seems important to my… let’s call it “creative growth.”

I could also see the value in organizing street art by “type;” spray-painted mural, artist’s mural, feel-good-“by-committee”-mural, youth street art, creative graffiti, destructive graffiti, political street art… and so on.

I rejected the “type” option after recognizing that one of the advantages of street art over museum art is the unexpected mixing of styles and approaches… there is no “Impressionist Wing” on the streets of San Francisco, and no “Armand Hammer Wing” at Clarion Alley.  

And then there’s the fact that “types” can be based on a viewer’s point of view… someone’s “creative” graffiti is someone else’s “destructive” graffiti… just as someone’s beautiful mural is someone else’s junk. (The same ideology can be inferred on museum work, but we give in to the “experts” that “know” what’s good for us and have chosen to display it so carefully.)

Then there’s the added factor that I don’t always know about the legitimacy of a piece of public art, and I’m sometimes surprised.  

One thing seems certain, whatever choice I make, in time other choices will walk up and introduce themselves. Sometimes politely.

I finally decided to organize the image folders by location, and made the initial galleries location-based. My thinking being that once the image location was settled, I could later create additional gallery pages by artist or any other category I chose to add more ways to view the available works.

Sometimes an evolving web site is like a growing child, with each new discovery leading to change-ripples throughout… or you could just blame it on bad planning.

The thumbnails page had its growing pains, to be sure, but it evolved into something close to what I’d been imagining. 

Even though the grouping is neither scientific nor geographical but colorful, chaotic and beautifully unpredictable, you can click on something you like to open a larger view… once there you can use the navigation system provided at the bottom of the page to see more from that location, or you can return to the Thumbnails page.

At the time of this writing there are 111 thumbnails on the page… and this number is likely to grow.  Eventually I may decide to split the Thumbnails Gallery into 2 pages… I don’t want Jakob Nielsen angry with me.

Some street art images easily lend themselves to thumbnail-abstraction. You don’t really have to crop, just shrink, while others are more problematic, though I’ve learned to think of these as “creative challenges…” and not problems.

That’s why the thumbnails have different widths but the same height… symmetry can be stimulating, but it is often overrated.  

I’ve made more traditional thumbnail galleries elsewhere…