カリフォルニア州バークレーを拠点とするフォトグラファー、ジャネット・デラニー（Janet Delaney）の作品集。1987年にサンフランシスコ・ソーマ（South of Market）地区へ移住した作者が、当時都市開発が急速に進む同地区で感じた低所得者や労働者階級移住者への経済効果の影響（しわ寄せ）を近隣住民12人へのインタビューと彼らの住まいや職場を捉えた作品を収録。これは都市開発によって繁栄したサンフランシスコの過去の空想的描写ではなく、むしろ肉体労働者や自営業者、アーティスト、同性愛者らが作り上げた今は亡きスモール・コミュニティーの存在を証明するものである。

Crime is something that happens between winos and gays and Latino youths. It isn’t thought to be something that happens when speculators exploit a political situation and just move in and displace 5,000 people over ten years. That’s not crime, that’s business. Which makes headlines… and which makes profits? - Jim Pomeroy, artist and Langton Street resident

South of Market is a photographic portrait of a San Francisco neighbourhood in the throes of urban renewal. In 1978, Janet Delaney moved to San Francisco’s South of Market district because the location was central and the rent was cheap. On the weekends she photographed with her large format camera at the nearby construction site for what is now the Moscone Convention Centre. After witnessing the nighttime demolition of an adjacent residential hotel, Delaney became interested in the rippling economic effects urban renewal was having on poor and working class residents. Leaving the construction site behind, Delaney joined local efforts to protest the city’s treatment of the community and began to photograph and interview her neighbors in their homes and places of work. South of Market is not a romantic representation of San Francisco’s past, but rather a testament to a vanished community made up of blue-collar workers, small business owners, families with children, artists, and gay men. The work is especially relevant today, as a new wave of gentrification brought on by the second internet boom is again driving less affluent residents out of San Francisco. “As I continue to photograph in San Francisco and in urban areas around the world,” says Delaney, “I see that who plays and who pays remains, as it always was, the central issue.” The photographs are accompanied by interviews which offer personal responses to the impact of gentrification on twelve of Delaney’s neighbours. An essay by Erin O’Toole sets the context for this story by providing a history of this constantly evolving San Francisco neighbourhood.