Vistas Spanning Sky and Sea

Among the many vantage points from which I have viewed the Golden Gate Bridge, my favorites include the ramparts of Fort Point, a pre-Civil War fortification directly beneath the southern footings of the bridge, the World War II-era artillery batteries in the Marin Headlands on the northern approaches, and the wholly pacific dining room of Greens, a Zen vegetarian restaurant in the arts complex that now occupies Fort Mason. Indeed, there is no bad place from which to observe what is arguably the single most sublime achievement of architecture and engineering in the world.

For photographer Richard Misrach, the bridge is best observed from the easternmost reaches of the San Francisco Bay, as he allows us to see in “Golden Gate” (Arena Editions, $50, 162 pages), a sumptuous collection of 85 photographs culled from more than 700 taken by Misrach over a three-year period.

“In 1997 my family and I moved to a home in the Berkeley hills with an extraordinary view of the Golden Gate Bridge,” Misrach explains. “These pictures were taken from our front porch.”

The images are rich in color and texture, deeply contemplative in tone, and always “painterly” in execution--each one presents itself as a finished work of art rather than a documentary photograph or a landscape study. Significantly, the only comment that Misrach makes on his work is a series of captions that record the precise time and date of each exposure: “10-29-97 4:35 p.m.” is the first, and “11-10-00 12:50-3:40 a.m.” is the last. Otherwise, Misrach lets the photographs speak for themselves.

Remarkably, the photographs amount to a chorus of voices even though each one was taken from exactly the same point on Misrach’s front porch. Sometimes the vista is beclouded and befogged; sometimes it is flush with the reds and golds of a winter sunset; sometimes it is a night sky that has been embellished with a fireworks display or the lights of passing aircraft. The sheer variety of cloud formations, ranging from ominous to luminous, is a marvel in itself.

Indeed, as seen from the far-distant Berkeley hills, the Golden Gate Bridge shows up only as a few spare lines along the bottom margin of each photograph. After the first half a dozen plates, the bridge seems to turn into something iconic rather than monumental. And, in some of the photographs, the bridge can hardly be seen--one of the most memorable images shows us a dirigible floating serenely over a fog bank through which appear only the towering spires of the bridge.

“Golden Gate” includes a brief natural history of San Francisco Bay by geographer Richard Walker and an equally illuminating (if sometimes slightly prickly) essay on Misrach’s artistic techniques and intentions by art historian T.J. Clark, both on the faculty at UC Berkeley and, not coincidentally, neighbors of the photographer.

“What is in front of the camera is a known location, a sight, a stage set, a Way Out West--a cliche, a spectacle, a modern wonder--a postcard, a page from National Geographic,” writes Clark. “Every time I spread out a handful of new Misrach 8-by-10s on my floor, the same faint undertow of feeling takes me. Is anxiety the right word for it, or something closer to regret--even guilt? What was it about the weather I had chosen not to see?”

The watchful Misrach, standing vigil on his front porch day after day, night after night, year after year, allows us to join him in seeing all the permutations of the weather over the Golden Gate. That’s why the book is not unlike the series of haystacks painted by Claude Monet: Misrach is no less accomplished in showing how much he sees when he returns again and again to the same subject, and his work strikes me as far richer and more resonant.

*

“Having long boasted of being Mexico’s second city, Los Angeles now also has a Salvadoran population equal to or greater than San Salvador,” writes Mike Davis in the revised and updated edition of “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City” (Verso, $13, 202 pages) originally published last year. “These are millennial transformations with truly millennial implications for U.S. politics and culture.”

Davis is the sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued critic and historian who earned his reputation as a kind of urban Cassandra with such books as “City of Quartz” and “Ecology of Fear.” In “Magical Urbanism,” Davis sets himself the task of explaining “the consequences of putting Latinos where they clearly belong: in the center of debate about the future of the American city.”

The new edition of “Magical Urbanism” draws on the latest results of the 2000 census, and Davis puts the statistics to good use in explaining why he sees the growing Latino population of the United States as the last, best hope for the salvation of our cities.

Crediting the Latino community for rejecting “the crabgrass prejudices of an overwhelmingly suburban nation,” he insists that urban renewal works best when it is carried out by men, women and children whose cultural heritage includes both “Latino carnivality” and “phantasmagorical urbanism.”

Davis refuses to romanticize or sentimentalize his subject. He confronts us with the environmental catastrophe that has attended the growth of industry along the U.S.-Mexico border in the wake of NAFTA--”a 2,000-mile-long Love Canal,” according to one of the sources he quotes. He decries the government policies and practices that have resulted in what he calls the “criminalization” of immigrants and the “militarization” of the border. And he despairs over the simmering racism that has sometimes boiled up into outright violence: “In Orange County and elsewhere,” he writes, “the new ‘brown peril’ became the moral equivalent of the obsolete red menace.”

But he also insists that the growing Latino population represents a reservoir of vision, daring, enterprise and energy that offers the prospect of solving precisely those problems that the Anglo population has ignored. “Today, even in the historically poorest census tracts, including most of the Central-Vernon, Florence-Firestone and Watts-Willowbrook districts, there is not a street that has not been dramatically brightened by new immigrants,” he writes. “Cumulatively, the sweat equity of 75,000 or so Mexican and Salvadoran homeowners has become an unexcelled constructive force (the opposite of white flight) working to restore debilitated neighborhoods to trim respectability.”

Davis suggests that the “visionary activism” of the Latino community will ultimately prevail over poverty, racism and despair in our benighted urban centers. “All of Latin America is now a dynamo turning the lights back on in the dead spaces of North American cities,” he writes. And he sees in the latest census results a historic reversal of Latino history and an affirmation of Latino destiny in California.

“The Anglo conquest of California in the late 1840s has proven to be a very transient fact indeed,” he concludes. “To be Latino in the United States is ... to participate in a unique process of cultural syncretism that may become a transformative template for the whole society.”

*

West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.