San Francisco
About the Artist
Photographer Fred Lyon has been called “San Francisco’s Brassai”. He’s also been compared to Cartier Bresson, Atget and Andre Kertez, but all with a San Francisco twist. That’s fine with this lifelong native who happily admits his debt to those icons.
His nonstop career reaches back to the early 1940’s and embraces news, architecture, advertising, wine and food. In the golden years of magazine publishing his picture credits were everywhere from LIFE to VOGUE and beyond. These days find him combing his picture files for galleries, publishers and print collectors. And he’s still excited when he gets a call offering a new project.
San Francisco has always been good to me. It presents its many faces to the eye, and thus to myriad lenses. Isolating the pertinent facets and linking them together is job one for photo storytellers. Somehow this has always seemed obvious and therefore unremarkable to me. But it’s the visual feast, The Grand Buffet that continues to wake up the camera. I need another lifetime to document the changes in this magical city.
— Fred Lyon