Documenting solitude in a crowded city

Sriman Narayanan

I work on a video series titled Life & Art for a publication called Burbs Entertainment. The series’s focus is using video and music to convey the emotions I feel when engaging with a specific piece of art. For a piece on Anna Karenina, I filmed open fields, and when I covered Frank Ocean, I dipped into Lake Michigan and filmed waves.

When I landed in San Francisco, and watched my first sunrise from my hotel window, I decided to pursue footage that reflected the air of nostalgia and wonder the Bay Area had filled me with, akin to the project I’m covering, Porter Robinson’s album Nurture.

I saw so much red and yellow and purple, but my camera’s lens caught and amplified the greens and blues to an unbearable degree. Everything was oversaturated.

The city was also incredibly crowded, and a main tenet of Life & Art is silence. It’s meant to be a meditation on solitude with nature and with art— but every place I visited was packed to the brim with locals trying to soak in the gorgeous weekend.

Below are a series of stills from the upcoming episode of Life & Art— an attempt at conveying how the landscapes of San Francisco looked through the lens of an iPhone XR, and an edit’s attempt to show how they looked to the eye. The stills are also an attempt at getting intimate, quiet shots amid large groups of people.

Angel Island, San Francisco Bay

This shot taken on Angel Island is the prime example of the iPhone camera’s green/blue bias. My edit attempts to emphasize the yellows and reds, but it partially fails here as it misrepresents the time of day the photo was taken (this was taken a little after 11am, but the golden light on the trees implies it’s closer to sunset).

Angel Island was the only truly quiet place we visited.

Twin Peaks, San Francisco

Twin Peaks proved similarly frustrating through the lens of the iPhone. The landscape itself was gorgeous, though, and by clearing out some of the lens glare I think I was able to properly represent the warm tones of the dirt, which stained my shoes red but looks brown in the original photo when placed next to the too-blue sky.

I had to wait to get this moment, because a group of hikers had assembled at the top of the hill. When they did move away, I got a good 30-45 seconds of footage. The layers of San Francisco was definitely something I wanted to capture, hills that rolled in and out across a city. I sharpened this in the edit, because the haze dampened these layers in a way that wasn’t noticeable to the eye.

The Painted Ladies, San Francisco

The yellows are most subtle here, but I think it has the largest effect. I wanted to make sure the color was more punchy and almost cartoon-like, since the houses were so vintage and had become this iconic image of San Francisco. The houses are framed so low because of the packed street beneath them.

The Palace of the Fine Arts, San Francisco

Every video I took of the palace either overexposed the background and hid the building or hid the background and overexposed the building. In the edit, I wanted to emphasize how warm everything was, from the water to the walls that had been there for a century. The original photo didn’t show that age, and though my use of red may have been excessive, it was in an effort to preserve what felt like a historic landmark.

The Palace of the Fine Arts, San Francisco

This shot came from behind the last still. I hopped over a fence to get this spot between the two points of herbage, and I loved that it opened up to a view of the city behind it. This is what I was trying to show with the shot atop Twin Peaks: the layers of the city.

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

I was just across from the Golden Gate Bridge when I shot this video. Hoards of people were beneath, above and around me, only focusing left, towards the bridge. I tried to get some footage, but all of it was hindered by people. But when I turned around, I found these hills, and saw only one person filming that direction with me. I crawled down the hill and asked him about his process, if he was having trouble with similar things as me.

He walked me through some of the techniques I used here, notably the use of grain to dampen the often harsh San Francisco light that proved unforgiving for my camera. He eventually told me he shot for a group called @bay.shooters on Instagram, but he didn’t want to give his name.

He also said that he didn’t think there was a “true” when it came to photography. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was so locked in on his shot.

I’ve thought about that idea, because as a journalist I felt like I was misrepresenting parts of the images I was dealing with. They felt true, after editing, to how they made me feel, but I wasn’t sure if there was something objective about the shots I was missing by adding noise or ignoring the people that were clearly there. It felt like the camera was lying too.

San Francisco offered challenges, both logistically and ethically, to my storytelling practices. But I’m glad I had the opportunity to explore them, because even though I’m left without many answers, I feel better for having the mementos of grappling with the questions.