Urban Eden: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
A Lecture at 2024 Photographer’s Rendezvous.
St. Francis Retreat Center. San Juan Bautista, CA.
November 2, 2024 7:30pm
In May of 2020, during the Covid-19 shutdown, I revisited Golden Gate Park to see the nesting Great Blue Herons at Blue Heron Lake (then known as Stow Lake). That visit, combined with the Corona-virus shutdown, led me to re-examine and continue a series of photographs I have been making in the park for decades, formally birthing “Urban Eden: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.”
Golden Gate Park is 150 years old, occupying 1017 acres of human transformed sand dunes and rocky hills made into an expansive urban park offering refuge to one of the great cities of the world. The park is a unique constructed landscape, designed to be a garden and refuge making it a visually dynamic place. In many ways it mimics ideas of Eden in its sanctuary-like experience.
Urban Eden continues my lifelong work in landscape photography exploring this park with an extensive new body of original photographs including work made over the past 30 years joined with a rich selection of historic images and maps.
This lecture explores the birth of this project, and chronicles its evolution from seduction, to field trips, research, the first book mock-ups and now printing the exhibition.
The Photographer’s Rendezvous
If you're new to the Rendezvous, this is an opportunity to meet other photographers, exchange ideas, prints, and show your art work in front of supportive, non-judgmental group of fellow photographers. Looking around our group, there's over 2000 years of photographic experience in both darkroom and digital photography and all their exciting media crossovers. Have a burning photographic question? Ask around! And I'm sure you'll find the answers you're looking for. Most show exceptional photographic/digital prints and drone photography. Some show work that's wonderfully different in various media. All are extremely interesting and thought provoking. A few will take your breath away.
What to expect? This will be an “Original Formula Rendezvous” in the 30 years + of the Al Weber Rendezvous tradition.