this is a draft page of a work in progress

San Francisco’s Urban Eden: Golden Gate Park

A Photographic Portrait by Stephen Johnson

Urban Eden: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Urban Eden explores San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park combining Johnson’s new original photographs with his work made over the past 30 years joined with a rich selection of historic images and maps.

Bird’s Eye View of Golden Gate Park. 1892.

The Park

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is 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 owned by the City of San Francisco and maintained by the San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks.

Considered un-plantable by early consultants, the engineering, dedication and vision brought to bear to create this park is an amazing history in and of itself.

Now celebrating 150 years of existence, the park is home to forests and lakes, a major science and art museum, a world-class arboretum and historic flower conservatory, sports fields, a Bison Sanctuary, complex water system and many miles of footpaths. It draws 24 million visitors a year, contains a great variety of trees and plants while supporting many animal populations.

The park was born in the 1870s of pride and recreational needs of a growing young city. Its creation was steeped in political aspirations and controversy and the park has endured those same dichotomies throughout its history. From issues of funding, intended audiences, commercial development and water needs, the park is a thoroughly human idea benefiting from nature’s fecundity and natural conditions at odds with the goals its creators.

Golden Gate 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 is a photographic exploration of the beauty, diversity, and sheer power of will in planning and creating spaces.

Golden Gate Park, Western San Francisco and the Golden Gate. 2015. Stephen Johnson.

Park Map in various locations around the park. San Francisco Department of Recreation and Parks.

Urban Eden: Golden Gate Park Photography and Memory

Landscape has been the subject matter of my career, mostly natural landscapes, often of endangered lands. Golden Gate Park is a created landscape, shaped from ocean facing dunes and hills into almost a Garden of Eden. It is that notion of a human created Eden that has often been in the forefront of my thoughts about the park.

After my photographic projects on Mono Lake and the Great Central Valley, Golden Gate Park seemed a natural follow on, a synthetic urban oasis. But the park is very complex, visually diverse, and it was always hard to see how to shape a body of work from that diversity of scene, construct and weather. That challenge remains.

In May of 2020, during the Covid-19 shutdown, an invitation was extended by a friend to come up to Golden Gate Park to see the nesting Great Blue Herons at 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.

Golden Gate Park would not likely be built today. Consideration would now be given to the dunes, the lakes, the woodlands, their natural ecosystems and intrinsic value. Such consideration is entirely appropriate. In a way that makes the park even more unique, it is the product of a venture not likely to be repeated. It is in that context of human construct, that I am fascinated by historical photographs of the park and I am already finding some unique and revealing images of the park’s challenged history. This project will summarize many of those challenges and decisions that need to be made to shape the park’s future. Park managers have long had to balance pressures to develop recreational facilities with more natural forests and meadowlands. Highlighting where this park came from, the issues surrounding its origins and development, this project documents Golden Gate Park’s extraordinary value and possible futures.

As I look at Golden Gate Park again, so many past strolls and events come to mind. Meeting my ex-wife on the front steps of the California Academy of Sciences, to receiving confirmation there of our first child on the way, to a huge Peace March in 1971, concerts and loving strolls all come to mind. That has led to digging out older photographs, historical imagery, making a concerted effort anew, and that has proved more rewarding than I could have imagined.

Current Status: Since May 14, 2020, I have made scores of trips into the park and considered the breadth of possibility that this project entails. I want to allow people to see the evolution of this project, documenting how an idea becomes an exploration, which slowly evolves into a body of work and is then pulled together into a finished exhibition/book possibility. The exploration is fully underway. Although I will continue to photograph as I start printing the exhibition, different times of day, variety of weather oncditions and the evolving parks have all kept me interested.