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 & 24th Street, Lilac, Bryant at 18th,
Florida at 17th, 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…
