American Photographer — publishing one million photographs.
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2006
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I took this photograph 20 years ago, in November 2006. A Yellow Cab outside the Virgin Megastore in San Francisco, red neon on the wet street.
People bought CDs here.
Virgin closed in 2009. Forever 21, gone in 2019. A candy pop-up.
Then empty.
Nordstrom Rack is due next fall.
The hardest table in New York just opened in Las Vegas, and I was there on its second night.
The Corner Store opened in SoHo in fall 2024. Lines at 4 in the afternoon for one of thirteen bar seats. Monday night it opened on the third floor of the Cosmopolitan, same menu and same martinis, plus a steak program just for Vegas. I was there with my wife and my two daughters for her birthday.
The martinis are the thing. They come to the table on a tray with a chilled sidecar sitting in a bowl of ice, and the olives are the show. I had the sour cream and onion martini. My daughter had hers with caviar on the olives.
My favorite plate was the Wagyu French dip, 72-hour ribeye in a soft roll with horseradish.
Save room for the apple pie. Two golden fried hand pies, crisp on the outside, and the best way to end the meal.
The service is what I will remember most. It never felt like one waiter. It felt like a whole team of professionals who had quietly agreed we were their only table.
Sixteen years ago I was invited to photograph the Cosmopolitan before it opened. Being back in that building shooting a brand new restaurant on its second night, with my family at the table, felt like coming full circle.
Full set of photos here: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk…
Dinner is 5 to 10 Sunday through Thursday, 5 to late Friday and Saturday. Reservations through the Cosmopolitan or 702-675-9828.
This negative is 94 years old. It ended up in an archive I bought out of Maryland.
The envelope just says Camp 1932, Marine Reserve. No name.
Look at his face. He's about to smile at whoever is holding the camera.
Atomic Liquors on Fremont.
Vegas tavern license #00001. The Rat Pack and Barbra Streisand came here after their shows to get away from the crowds on the Strip. Later it showed up in Casino and The Hangover.
Just shot this. The new Hard Rock guitar going up on the Strip where the Mirage volcano used to fire.
42 stories. 660 feet of blue glass. They're still building the neck.
When it opens late 2027, six beams of light will shoot 20,000 feet into the sky off it, like guitar strings. Eyesore or the most Vegas building ever? I can't decide.
RIP Mirage. Steve Wynn built it in 1989 for $630 million, the world's most expensive hotel-casino at the time. Siegfried & Roy did 5,700 shows there before the tiger ended it in 2003, and Beatles LOVE played to 11.5 million before going dark in 2024.
This is Liberace's rhinestone Excalibur roadster. I photographed it at the Cosmopolitan in 2014, and Duran Duran put it on the cover of Pop Trash.
Good morning from Las Vegas. No coffee maker in the room at the Fontainebleau, so it is down to the lobby for coffee. Sigh.
Today I am out walking, making photographs. Maybe the Mob Museum. Maybe the Strip. Maybe the Stratosphere at sunset. The new Hard Rock guitar tower has its blue windows on but the neck still needs finishing. RIP Mirage.
Scott Jordan is in town. Dinner at Don's tonight.
Mob Museum or the Strip first? Strat waits for sunset.
His balloon wouldn't fly. His first mountain fell down. He built another one.
I photographed Leonard Knight at Salvation Mountain on April 10, 2011. But another photographer's pictures brought me there.
My Flickr friend Extra Super Cutie had made an album called "Going to see a man about a mountain." She was the first photographer I featured when I started an artist-of-the-week series on my blog in 2008.
She died in 2010, still in her twenties. Her best friend told me she had passed away in her sleep. I never learned why.
Her photographs stayed with me. The following April, I went to see Leonard myself.
He showed me photographs of himself with famous politicians. He seemed a little lost to me, struggling cognitively, but still proud of his work.
And what work it was.
On the giant red heart, beneath the words GOD IS LOVE, Leonard painted a prayer: "Say Jesus I'm a sinner please come upon my body and into my heart."
An entire mountain built to get that invitation in front of strangers.
Leonard spent 28 years building and painting Salvation Mountain in the desert near Niland, California. Fifty feet tall and 150 feet wide. Adobe, straw, salvaged tires and wood, covered in an estimated 100,000 gallons of donated paint.
Before the mountain, he spent years sewing a patchwork hot-air balloon to carry the words GOD IS LOVE. The fabric rotted, and it never left the ground. So he put his message on the ground instead.
His first mountain took four years to build. A rainstorm cracked it in 1989 and it collapsed. He took that as a sign it was not safe, and started over with adobe and straw.
He worked on it in the early morning, two or three hours before visitors arrived, then spent the rest of the day showing people around.
His work reached the Congressional Record. On May 15, 2002, Senator Barbara Boxer called it "a national treasure" and "a sculpture for the ages."
The mountain appeared in Into the Wild, where Leonard played himself. But what impressed me most was not the fame. It was the endurance. Returning to the same work, year after year, making something this big.
Whatever you think of the art or the religion, he made the world a more interesting place.
Leonard died on February 10, 2014, at 82, after declining health had forced him to leave the mountain for a care facility in El Cajon.
Today, volunteers with the nonprofit Salvation Mountain Inc. preserve and maintain his work.
His mountain lives on.
I still go back and look at that original album of photos by Extra Super Cutie:
flickr.com/photos/extrasuper…
Forty photos. The album itself has had 55 views, and most of them are probably mine.
She posted her last photo on Flickr on July 23, 2010, more than 16 years ago. But her photos have outlived her. They still sit out there, rarely visited, on a dormant Flickr account I hope never goes away.
Found slide. Grant Avenue, San Francisco, at night.
Imagine trying to decide where to eat with every other doorway looking like this.
Neon pagodas. Strings of lights. Cars crawling down the block.
I'm guessing mid-60s, bathed in the light of hte neon glow.
Found photograph. San Francisco, mid-1960s, looking down Mason toward Clay.
The cars caught me first. Then the little sign on the pole: AIR RAID SHELTER.
Malvina Place on the corner, bay windows all the way down, and a corner market selling wine and beer on a hill you would hate to parallel park on.
Anyone recognize that market?
Found slide. Stockton and Maiden Lane, San Francisco, at night.
Who remembers buying a plane ticket at a downtown office, not an app?
TWA still had a ticket office on the corner, FLY in blue neon. The Drake Wiltshire glowing up the block. Two women crossing in heels like it was nothing.
The lamps looked like candelabras.
Market Street, July 1959. A Hamm's sign, a Greyhound depot and the Ferry Building waiting at the end of the road.
At noon today that same spot is the starting line for the Valkyries championship parade.
Market Street was such a different place back then.
Polls close at 8 PM. California picks Gavin Newsom's replacement today.
Last poll: Becerra 61, Hilton 34.
If you want more of what the last 8 years gave us, you know who to vote for. If you don't, vote Hilton like I did.
Did you vote yet?
Straight up gangsters.
“David Duong instructed him to distribute gym bags of cash—$300,000 to one sitting councilmember and $50,000 to a representative of another.”
Day 11 of the Sheng Thao trial.
Mario Juarez, the government’s star witness, took the stand and told the jury he conspired to bribe a public official. “Her name is Sheng Thao,” he said.
Juarez testified that he met with Thao at his High Street office on October 7, 2022, about a month before the election. He pitched Evolutionary Homes. She agreed to the proposal but demanded $300,000, to be paid through her partner Andre Jones so her involvement would stay hidden. Juarez said that demand was not part of the original pitch he prepared with Andy Duong. He went back and told Duong about the catch.
The Duongs financed roughly $75,000 in last-minute attack mailers against Loren Taylor. Juarez said Jones supplied opposition research and input on the targets. After Thao appeared to win, the group met for dinner at Skates on the Bay in Berkeley on March 9, 2023. There, Juarez testified, they discussed raising Jones’s compensation from $300,000 to as much as $3 million if Oakland bought the modular units at $10,000 per unit.
A whiteboard presentation at California Waste Solutions listed the $300,000 payment to Thao and Jones as an expense against projected profits of about $68 million from Evolutionary Homes. Juarez said the arrangement was a financial investment: “She needs to pay up. We helped her win.”
Juarez also described an earlier pattern. After the 2014 vote that handed California Waste Solutions Oakland’s recycling contract, he said David Duong instructed him to distribute gym bags of cash—$300,000 to one sitting councilmember and $50,000 to a representative of another.
The man who has already pleaded guilty to the conspiracy spent the day walking the jury through the price Sheng Thao set and the payments that followed. His testimony continues Thursday.
Tomorrow California picks Gavin Newsom's replacement. Good.
I took this photograph of him almost 20 years ago. One night in February 2008 I ran into him in the Powell Street BART station. Mayor Newsom, a couple of staffers, no cameras, working the homeless panhandlers and selling them on his programs.
This was the guy who built his career on Care Not Cash. In 2004 SF cut homeless cash grants from $410 a month to $59 and promised shelter and services instead. He promised us back then a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness.
It didn't last. Today San Francisco still loads cash onto EBT cards that homeless recipients pull out at ATMs. You only have to be here two weeks to qualify for it. Walk down Sixth Street at Market and see where the money goes. Straight into the pockets of the cartels.
Then he failed up to governor. He inherited a boom and ran it down.
California has 181,934 homeless people. That's more than any other state and nearly 1 in 4 homeless Americans.
1.7 million more people have left California for other states than moved here since 2020.
Only 19% of California households can afford a median-priced home. You need $228,000 a year just to qualify. The middle class isn't being squeezed. It's being evicted.
Gas: $3.16 a gallon when he took office. $6.06 last month, $1.75 above the national average. Our gas tax is the highest in America and goes up every single July.
PG&E: rates up 45% since 2021, double inflation.
Who knew back then how badly he'd mismanage homelessness, first in San Francisco and then across all of California?
I hope he never gets anywhere near the White House. If he mismanaged our country the way he's mismanaged our state, it would be an unmitigated disaster.
It's taken 54 years, but San Francisco is moving to make the Transamerica Pyramid an official city landmark.
San Franciscans hated it when it went up in 1972. Now it IS San Francisco.
Best building in the city?
sfgov.legistar.com/Legislati…
.@bilalmahmood represents what may be the most fentanyl-ravaged district in America.
Hundreds of people overdose and die in his district every year. Kids step over bodies and needles on their way to school.
This past week @ICEgov arrested FOUR Honduran drug dealers poisoning his district.
Not one word of thanks.
Not one word at all.
Instead he's on X virtue signaling and bragging about cutting a $1,000 check to Abdul El-Sayed.
In MICHIGAN.
2,000 miles away.
His constituents are dying on the sidewalk and he's playing national party donor.
This is what passes for leadership in San Francisco.
Shameful.
Another one bites the dust.
@ICEgov is on a roll deporting criminal HONDURAN drug dealers in San Francisco.
Keep up the good work. The people of the Bay Area support you, appreciate you, and want you here.
Still not a peep from “we’ve still gotta lot of work to do” mayor @DanielLurie @bilalmahmood @sfbos or lame duck sanctuary state King of California @GavinNewsom
Love that these ICE arrests from @EROSanFrancisco are coming with nationality and mugshots unlike our @SFPD who refuses to publish either.
Keep up the pressure @ICEgov and let’s deport a few hundred more.
These are the worst of the worst.
Hopefully you are sending these drug dealers to CECOT where they can spend some serious time reflecting on the Americans they have killed with their poison.
Powell and Market, San Francisco, 1950s, by the great Fred Lyon.
Woolworth's on one corner, Bank of America on the other, a cable car waiting at the turnaround, Hotel Powell's sign hanging over the street, and men in hats and women in heels crowding every sidewalk.
Downtown San Francisco when it was the beating heart of the West.
Lyon photographed this city for more than 70 years and was still shooting into his 90s. This is from his book "San Francisco: Portrait of a City, 1940–1960," one of my favorite photography books on SF.
That same corner today tells you everything about what we've lost, and what we could get back.
This neon sign is gone.
I photographed the Sun Land Motel sign on Main Street in Mesa, Arizona, at sunset in February 2013. A red neon starburst sun, MOTEL in big block letters, a glowing VACANCY oval, and little signs promising COLOR TV and PHONES, back when those were reasons to pull over.
It stood there since at least the 1960s, when Main Street was the old Apache Trail, with more than 60 motels and over 100 neon signs fighting for your headlights.
In 2016 it came down, replaced by a plastic panel sign. The motel is still open. The sun is not.
Two blocks away, the Starlite's Diving Lady blew over in a 2010 storm and was rebuilt and relit in 2013. As far as I can tell, nobody saved the Sun Land's.
These signs are Americana. They're part of our shared history and heritage. They're expensive to keep lit, and weather, neglect and redevelopment take most of them in the end.
I'm going to keep preserving as many as I can, photographically, until I'm gone too.
