Web

This is a start.

gravatar
By Callaghan
 · 
March 23, 2021
 · 
3 min read
Tagged: journal, signs

I've been taking photos in San Francisco for about 25 years, mostly of graffiti, signs, buildings, and various urban landscapes. For a long time, I've maintained an Instagram account where I post images from my print archive, as well as from the hundreds of digital pictures I take every week on my iPhone.

But I got tired of social media about 3 years ago, with the exception of the occasional post on Instagram, and keeping my LinkedIn profile up to date. I didn't really like the performative nature of posting on Facebook, and I've never really done much on Twitter except follow people I thought were interesting and fend off multiple offers (and threats) from people who want my username.

I had bought the callaghan.org domain back in the 90s, and haven't really ever done much with it beyond pointing it at my tumblr or my about.me profile.

Getting laid off recently gave me a little motivation to build my own site. I wanted a work portfolio where I could be more descriptive than on LinkedIn about some of the projects I've worked on. But I also wanted a place to be more creative about posting photography, drawings, and general thoughts in a more intentional space than social media, and in a digital space that I own.

So I'm pretty stoked to finally be putting together an old-fashioned blog. Made sense to me to build it on WordPress, and I decided to use Semplice, a theme that specializes in building visual portfolios, and allows for almost infinite customization without writing too much custom code. It is hosted on Flywheel.

I have another domain at which I'll be hand-coding another website using an SSG (more on that later), but this allowed me to get up and running pretty quickly once I mapped out what I wanted.

I won't be breaking news on here, but hopefully this space will allow me to share stories about the stuff that interests me the most. Like technology, graffiti, and signs.

The "17 Reasons Why!" sign on top of the building at the corner of 17th and Mission Streets in San Francisco was one of those things that started out as advertising and morphed into something that was emblematic of the neighborhood and city as a whole. It was kind of dreamy and evocative, simultaneously a declaration and a query.
When it was taken down in June 2002, the 17 Reasons sign was rescued by a guy named Steven Parr, and put in storage at a Capp Street warehouse which he maintained as the SF Media Archive. The "Why!" portion of the sign had been removed many years earlier and hung in a nearby backyard, all except for the exclamation point, which has been lost since the 90s.
The "why" portion of the sign, without the exclamation point, ended up in a Shotwell Street backyard after it was removed from the larger sign in the mid-90s.
When I worked with The L Word in 2007 to build a social network based on the central theme of the show, the writers were looking for an old sign to use in one of the episodes as a symbol of love that one of the characters could steal off of an abandoned building and give to her girlfriend to win her back. Knowing my interest these things, they asked me for ideas, and I immediately thought of 17 Reasons. It was reproduced at 1/4 scale and used in the final episode of season 4.

© 2023, Beth Callaghan