A Love of Bridges, Part 13: Starting the Return Journey: Being There Is One Small Part of Being There | Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco to Marin County, California, USA (1937)
Facing southward, and taken from just about the northern end of the bridge proper.
The pedestrian figures at left are those of two of my fellow tin-can midshipmen aboard the USS Hollister.
In this last installment of my Golden Gate posts, I find myself waxing nostalgic again as I look at those period-piece automobiles crossing the bridge. In my previous description I called them gas-guzzlers, which they certainly were. At the time, however, we were made to think, through the ceaseless brainwashing of our corporate overlords, that they were the very latest thing in Space Age elegance. Now, though, their clunky and rust-prone forms take me back to my university-student days, the Early Seventies.
Still, if you let it off its leash, hindsight can be a nasty, snarling thing. For example, when I turn away from the traffic and look at that hillside marching down to the bridge at right, I bitterly wish I'd gone over there, examined its Jurassic or Cretaceous Franciscan Complex exposures, and maybe even collected a rock or two for me to place on my desk, fifty years later, and dote upon in my old age.
But then I reel my resentment in and realize that, when I took this photo with my trusty Instamatic, I wasn't even a geology major yet. On top of that, the amazing plate-tectonics story of the accretion of California, including this place now known as the Marin Headlands Terrane, had not been discovered in anything like its current depth and richness of detail.
So it turns out that the time to be studying what this picture contains is right now. My photos, of very little interest to anyone else, are overt magic to me. They aren't just depictions of scenes; they're golden gates indeed, and ones that open wide into the landscapes they portray.
This is a very important point. However many hours I actually spent on this bridge in the fullness of my actually being there—the cool sea breeze on my face, the low hum of the tires on the roadway—ultimately meant less to me than the many more hours of research and reflection spent in the greater plenitude of the bridge regarded later.
In other words, the act of being there is essential only because it later leads to the memory of being there. And to the joyful and sustained embellishment of that memory. This to me is the miracle of photography, of freezing fragile time into a robust and active timelessness.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Love of Bridges album.
A Love of Bridges, Part 13: Starting the Return Journey: Being There Is One Small Part of Being There | Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco to Marin County, California, USA (1937)
Facing southward, and taken from just about the northern end of the bridge proper.
The pedestrian figures at left are those of two of my fellow tin-can midshipmen aboard the USS Hollister.
In this last installment of my Golden Gate posts, I find myself waxing nostalgic again as I look at those period-piece automobiles crossing the bridge. In my previous description I called them gas-guzzlers, which they certainly were. At the time, however, we were made to think, through the ceaseless brainwashing of our corporate overlords, that they were the very latest thing in Space Age elegance. Now, though, their clunky and rust-prone forms take me back to my university-student days, the Early Seventies.
Still, if you let it off its leash, hindsight can be a nasty, snarling thing. For example, when I turn away from the traffic and look at that hillside marching down to the bridge at right, I bitterly wish I'd gone over there, examined its Jurassic or Cretaceous Franciscan Complex exposures, and maybe even collected a rock or two for me to place on my desk, fifty years later, and dote upon in my old age.
But then I reel my resentment in and realize that, when I took this photo with my trusty Instamatic, I wasn't even a geology major yet. On top of that, the amazing plate-tectonics story of the accretion of California, including this place now known as the Marin Headlands Terrane, had not been discovered in anything like its current depth and richness of detail.
So it turns out that the time to be studying what this picture contains is right now. My photos, of very little interest to anyone else, are overt magic to me. They aren't just depictions of scenes; they're golden gates indeed, and ones that open wide into the landscapes they portray.
This is a very important point. However many hours I actually spent on this bridge in the fullness of my actually being there—the cool sea breeze on my face, the low hum of the tires on the roadway—ultimately meant less to me than the many more hours of research and reflection spent in the greater plenitude of the bridge regarded later.
In other words, the act of being there is essential only because it later leads to the memory of being there. And to the joyful and sustained embellishment of that memory. This to me is the miracle of photography, of freezing fragile time into a robust and active timelessness.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Love of Bridges album.