Pedestrians

Johan Hagemeyer had begun a career in horticulture, but a 1916 meeting in New York with the famed photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz inspired him to pursue photography full-time. Returning to his home in California, Hagemeyer found a kindred spirit in Edward Weston, whose early photographs embraced the painterly, hand-crafted approach of Pictorialism. Although both Stieglitz and Weston later adopted the tenets of straight photography—employing sharp focus and the full tonal range of photographic paper—Hagemeyer continued on his own path, interested in individual vision rather than pursuing what he saw as the mechanical representation of the world. In this photograph, he portrays the frenetic pace of the big city in an impressionistic manner, with faceless inhabitants obscured in shadow and blur. It is likely that the pedestrians of the title are commuters headed to San Francisco's Ferry Building to catch the boats that would take them to their homes across the bay.