//souvenirs of san francisco//

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it was fun to see my home framed through Kayla Bauer's art. Even though I've lived there for over two decades, I found that her photos reflected a really intentional being-with the city that I've never thought to practice, walking ten to twelve miles of its streets by herself each day, celebrating the dailiness that's so easy to glaze over and take for granted. 

Take the photo above, for example: the peach and lilac color blocking is brightened by the darker green hair on the sign, and the whole left side of the image balances the dark alleyway through the gate. It's a gorgeous accident that she found in the wild and documented, but how many people walk past this composition each day without really seeing it? What would it be like if people went through the world seeing art everywhere they went? 

I was particularly drawn to the lens of souvenirs as represented by the wall of plates. Souvenirs function as memory containers, as components of autobiographical collections, as artifacts of place (souvenir originated with the Latin subvenire, ‘occur to the mind’). Bauer ever so briefly discussed the history and aesthetics of souvenirs, but I could have listened to her talk about this subject for hours. I'm curious about the icons that become representative of a place, like the Golden Gate Bridge and (to a much lesser extent) trolley cars that are immediately recognizable as symbols of San Francisco, and which adorn the majority of the plates below. Some of the plates offer a wider variety of symbols, including the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower - therefore, they must offer even more memory encoding than the plates that only depict the Golden Gate, right? How do these mass produced, insincere objects acquire meaning for the tourists who possess them, and how does the commodification and distribution of local iconography give those icons themselves a sort of mythical significance in the narrative of that place?