Joseph Seely was a little-known photographer and historian of San Francisco's sidewalk culture in the 1950s.
Every American over the age of 60 (about 75 million people at last count) likely has some memory of 1950s urban fashion — hats, gloves, furs, and big purses. For those too young to remember the days when people dressed up to visit San Francisco's chic, very busy downtown, a little-known sidewalk photographer named Joseph Seeley has given us a front-row seat in this long-gone world.
Seeley, who died in 1988, and others he hired, stationed themselves in high-traffic areas like Union Square and photographed pedestrians as they sped by, hoping to sell the photos as souvenirs. There were enough applicants to keep Seeley in business for about 40 years.
When Seeley retired in the 1970s, he donated his 35mm negatives—amounting to more than a million frames—to the Rochester, New York-based Visual Studies Workshop. And there it remains, an untapped photo archive in San Francisco that needs a generous spirit to fund its digitization.
If Alfred Hitchcock's film was a classic vertigo Capturing the look and feel of San Francisco in 1958, Selle's fast-paced, sometimes distorted photographs bring its citizens back to life. Admittedly, his candid photographs are not museum quality. But what they may lack in focus or artistic technique, they make up for with verve, honesty and flashes of emotional insight.
And if that wasn't enough — from the cool sunglasses and sad ladies in fur to the men's black suits and endless array of women's coats — there's enough '50s style on display in these photos to put a permanent end to post-coronavirus athleisure fashion. Dress up and bring life to the city's past.
I've selected for your pleasure 58 of my favorite Selle photos—all taken in Union Square in 1958—from the thousands I've reviewed so far. Some of my selections are artistically ambiguous, a little dark, and a little out of focus. Don't be alarmed by what first appears gray or grainy. Look for telling details – a frown, a leering, a smile, a sneer, the folds of a fur jacket, a man's tie, a tightly pulled hat box, a prominent cigar, a confident step. Seeley has gifted us with an unvarnished parade of humanity, a precious time capsule that casts a ghostly, if disguised, shadow, as if his subjects were sending messages to the future in some collective way.
What could those messages be? I'll leave it up to you to decide.
