a map of hurts, S.F. edition
Every city large or small, every hamlet or village, every metropolis, has spots where some saddening experience has taken place — whether to human or animal, whether deeply tragic or karmically banal — and San Francisco is of course no exception.
Via my itinerant peregrinations throughout the city over this past half decade now, I've encountered such spots, marked as they were by flyers, impromptu memorials, messages scrawled on walls, sidewalks, lampposts, and other surfaces. I haven't documented every single one I've encountered, but have enough now to construct this "Map of Hurts, S.F. Edition".
It started with lamppost flyers of lost dogs or cats — of which there are many, comprising its own permanent genre of loss; but then I would also notice (and take pictures of) flyers about missing persons... and messages from people who are lost in one way or another. Closely related to these are the locations and memorials of someone who died, whether via vehicular accident, suicide, homicide, gang violence, drug overdose. Aside for a few, most of the impromptu memorials that spring up after such tragedies are temporary and fleeting; and as such, documenting them when they're up is a measure of one's witness.
And then there are the images of homeless people, again of which there are sadly many in this city, as in any large American metropolis. This is perhaps the most common locus of loss that is to be encountered on any given day an on any given neighborhood in the city. In my photographs I've made sure no faces are visible, as I have no intention of this documentation being exploitative and revealing of a fellow human being's pain or despair.
Today, I walked through the Western Addition at noon, having heard of the death of Jada Mabrey, a 15-year old girl caught in the crossfire of a gang-related triple shooting in her neighborhood last Friday evening, to stand a while at the memorial that sprung up on the sidewalk at Margaret S. Hayward Playground, along Golden Gate Avenue. Jayda was beloved by all who knew her — family, friends, teachers, classmates, neighbors. Malik Washington writes in The Davis Vanguard:
"There are moments when a city must slow down — when words must do more than inform, and instead learn how to listen. To grief. To truth. To the quiet courage left behind when a young life is taken too soon. Jayda Mabrey was a teenager. She was a daughter. She was a young soul who chose love over silence. On a Friday evening in late January, gunfire broke the routine calm of early evening in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. Near Golden Gate Avenue and Laguna Street — steps from a public playground and just blocks from City Hall — three juveniles were shot. Jayda Mabrey did not survive."
I share this here today as my own attempt to slow down and witness, in my own way; to mark the spot where Jayda's life was cut short, on my city map of hurts... and so, in this way, to memorialize this young person here, in the humble, anonymous, space of this blog.
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