Janet Delaney: SoMa Now

Janet Delaney: SoMa Now

Thirty-five years ago, photographer and educator Janet Delaney created the photography project, South of Market, about San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Referred to locally as SoMa, the area was a raw and gritty working-class neighborhood at the time of Delaney’s original project. Since then, SoMa has endured the devastation of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the 1990s boom, bust, and rebirth of the tech-firm industry. Today, SoMa is a dynamic and complicated hub for technology firms, luxury apartment buildings, and a significant population of impoverished or homeless people.

Delaney believes there is a great economic vitality in SoMa that was not present in the waning days of industrialism. As the tech industry redefines the urban landscape in SoMa, Delaney revisited the neighborhood and documented a transformation that she could not have imagined in the 1980s. Simultaneously delighted and stunned by these changes, she used her camera to bear witness to the neighborhood’s gentrification.

Raised in Compton, California, Janet Delaney received a MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1981 and has taught photography throughout the Bay Area for nearly two decades. Delaney has received three National Endowment for the Arts Grants and the James D. Phelan Award in Photography. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Pilara Foundation; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Alameda County Arts Commission, Oakland, California; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; the Musée de la Charleroi, Belgium; the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Janet Delaney lives and works in Berkeley, California.

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