Haight Ashbury, San Francisco 1999

Eli Reed made this gelatin silver print, titled ‘Haight Ashbury, San Francisco’. It asks us to reflect on the lived reality behind the famous imagery of San Francisco. A stark electric light illuminates a group of residents huddled together. The space feels cramped, with clothes hanging overhead, and the black and white tones add to the sense of a contained, perhaps impoverished, environment. Reed’s image disrupts the romantic associations of San Francisco as the city of the ‘flower power’ movement, and rather asks us to look at the living conditions of the people who actually live there. Reed, who was associated with Magnum Photos, often turned his lens to social issues. This image would have been made in the 1980s, a decade after the Summer of Love, and his interest lies in the realities of urban life, and how they diverge from the myths that circulate in popular culture. Photographs like this can be studied alongside census data, newspaper archives, and urban planning documents. The historian can help us understand the complex relationship between images and the social reality they represent.