Recently I stopped by City Hall for a tour of Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903-Now, an exhibit containing more than a century of photographs taken by San Francisco’s transit photographers. Jeremy Menzies, SFMTA’s current photographer, led the tour. He said that not many people realize “Muni photographer” is an actual job, but the position goes back to the early 1900s.

The SFMTA photo archive now contains more than 200,000 images, and the exhibit has more than 100 on display. Here are a few of the photos that caught my eye, and how you can see them all yourself.

The day after I toured the Muni photo archive at City Hall, I went to yet another transit-themed gathering. This time, instead of photos, the gathering was focused on transit art. The 2nd Annual Pop-Up Transit Art Fair took place in the Grand Hall of the Salesforce Transit Center on September 23. It brought together more than a dozen local artists and representatives from Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, California High-Speed Rail, and other transportation organizations. The event was part of Bay Area Transit Month, which took place in September.

While I wasn’t able to attend Muni Heritage Weekend, I saw a post on X that linked to a fun project from Daniel Lawrence Lu. At the event, he photographed historic streetcars with a line-scan camera. A line-scan camera allows a photographer to capture images a single row of pixels at a time rather than capturing an entire two-dimensional image all at once. Using this technique, one can photograph a train and capture a perfectly flat, continuous image of the entire train as it passes by, regardless of how long it is.

He was able to capture extremely detailed side views of Muni Streetcars, the Blackpool Boat Tram, a Melbourne tram, and other transit vehicles. Lu has posted the full collection on his website, along with notes on his line scan camera setup.

Yeah, we realize it is criminal to write a west side blog and go east to Sacramento during Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. Unfortunately, the pull of nu-metal nostalgia was too strong to resist. 

The good news is that this trip fits right into our Bay Area Transit focused issue. Last Wednesday, we took the Amtrak Capitol Corridor from Berkeley to Sacramento for Aftershock, a 4-day rock music festival where I caught Tool (one of my favorite bands of all time), along with Wu Tang Clan, Baby Metal, Danny Elfman, AFI and many others.