THE BAY SNAPSHOT
“The Bay Snapshot” is a series from The Bold Italic that showcases the current mood of the Bay Area in a picture. If you have a tip for a future post in the series, email us or DM us on Twitter or Instagram.
No depiction of San Francisco life is complete without an aerial view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Though such elevated vantage points of the iconic feat of human engineering are somewhat scarce. Aside from manmade perches — like, say, finding yourself dozens of floors up Salesforce Tower — there are just a handful of natural roosts of which to fully appreciate the Golden Gate Bridge from above.
The Marin Headlands, thankfully, is one such green place to sponge up a glimpse of the bridge some 584 feet above sea level. And that engrossment is made much more satiating when the person overlooking said San Francisco Bay bridge just so happens to be a sublime shutterbug.
Bay Area photographer Mosses Martinez, whose catalog of work spans everything from well-lit corporate headshots to stills of saturated urban fantasies, recently uploaded a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands. However, unlike the usual social media-fed images of the bridge — those with tweaked contrast proportions to make the captured rusty-reds and aqua-blues shine above their natural levels — Martinez chose to lend a monochromatic element to his picture.
You don’t see any reds or oranges or yellows. The water beneath the bridge exists as an off-tone of gray. Rays and refractions of sunlight bleed white. Clouds offer contrast to the otherwise shaded foreground. But in his stripped-down take on the picture’s subject, we, the viewers, get to appreciate the Golden Gate Bridge in entirely new hues.
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Even without its smattering of eye-catching colors, it’s just as captivating as ever — more so, perhaps. It’s both an ode and a testament to how the bridge’s very architecture manages to stir up something warm and entirely individual in every single one of us. Karla The Fog’s omnipresence is definitely a bonus, too.
Don’t forget: Visit mosesmartinez.com to see more of Martinez’s work; make sure to follow him on Instagram on his two photography handles, @mosesmartinezphotography and @moses_the_photomancer, to stay up on his Bay Area photography.
Check out some of our other pieces dedicated to photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, below:
