SF Throwbacks
San Francisco fashion in the 1950s
Joseph Selle was an unheralded photographer and chronicler of San Francisco’s sidewalk culture in the 1950s.
This article is part of SF Throwbacks, a feature series that tells historic stories of San Francisco to teach us all more about our city’s past.
By Jeff Miller
Every American past the age of 65 (about 75 million people at last count) likely has some memory of 1950s urban fashion — the hats, the gloves, the furs, and the big purses. For those too young to recall the days when people dressed up to visit a very chic and busy downtown San Francisco, an unheralded sidewalk photographer named Joseph Selle has given us a front-row seat on this long-gone world.
Selle, who died in 1988, together with others he hired, stationed themselves in high-traffic areas such as Union Square and photographed pedestrians as they hurried past, hoping to sell the photos as keepsakes. There were enough takers to keep Selle in business for nearly 40 years.
When Selle retired in the 1970s, he donated his 35mm negatives — amounting to more than one million frames — to Rochester, New York’s Visual Studies Workshop. There they remain, an untapped San Francisco photo archive in need of a generous soul to fund their digitization.
If Alfred Hitchcock’s film classic Vertigo captured the look and feel of 1958 San Francisco, Selle’s quick-snap and sometimes blurry photos bring its citizens back to life. Admittedly, his candid images are not museum-quality. But what they might lack in focus or artistic technique, they compensate for with vitality, honesty, and flashes of emotional insight.
And if that’s not enough — from cool sunglasses and sad-looking ladies in furs to men-in-black suits and an endless variety of women’s coats — there’s enough 1950s style on display in these images to put a permanent end to post-COVID athleisure wear and prompt a revival of the City’s dress-up past.
I’ve selected for your enjoyment more than 50 of my favorite Selle photos — all taken at Union Square in 1958 — from the thousands I’ve so far reviewed. Some of my choices are technically murky, a bit dark, and slightly out of focus. Don’t be put off by what first appears gray or grainy. Look for the telling details — a frown, a leer, a smile, a sneer, the folds of a fur jacket, a man’s bowtie, a hatbox clenched tight, a jutting cigar, or a confident stride. Selle has gifted us with a candid cavalcade of humanity, a precious time-capsule that casts a ghostly, if compelling spell, as if his subjects were messaging the future in some collective way.
What might those messages be? I will leave it to you to decide.
These photos were taken by Joseph Selle on San Francisco’s Union Square in 1958. All Selle images courtesy of Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY:
Jeff Miller is a culture writer.
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