The Wide Shot celebrates the work of Bay Area photographers, showcasing their latest projects and the behind-the-scenes stories of how they got the shots.

The year was 1977, and San Francisco was in the grips of intense social change. Harvey Milk was elected the nation’s first openly gay official, the nascent tech industry was just warming up, and the free love era had given way to a booming counter cultural scene. 

But none of this was apparent in the slow-moving outer reaches of the Sunset. 

There, Richard Sexton was photographing a working-class neighborhood still bound by tradition. 

For six months in 1977 and 1978, Sexton captured the neighborhood on Kodachrome and Ektachrome color transparency film. Endless rows of candy-colored houses, empty streets, and moody skies suggest a Hopperesque quality of unsettling solitude.

The result was “Outer Sunset 1977–1978,” a series of 38 color photos that are on display in San Francisco for the first time since 1979, thanks to the efforts of local artist and curator Nora Lalle. The founding editor of Pamplemousse Magazine, Lalle learned of the photos when she ran into Sexton, 71, at a photography festival in New Orleans, then fell in love with the beautiful history of western San Francisco they portrayed.

“When he sent me the images, I was just sort of in shock. I was overwhelmed with how beautiful they were. For me, what stood out was the color,” Lalle said. “There was this timeless quality to them.”

A southerner who lived in San Francisco from 1977 to 1991, Sexton is a fine art photographer based in New Orleans. His photography has been featured in magazines, historical archives, and museums worldwide. He spoke with The Standard about how “Outer Sunset 1977–1978” came together. 

I was living on Haight Street in 1977, where I was an undergraduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute and was considering applying for the MFA program. At that point, I was exclusively shooting in black and white, so I wanted a color project to include in my portfolio. Most of the people were maybe moving to New York at that time if they wanted the kind of career I wanted. But I just didn’t. San Francisco is the place that I saw myself being. Hip people were coming in from all over the country and making a home here.

Except out there: The Outer Sunset was where people who had grown up in San Francisco lived. They were middle and working class, a lot of them older. It was an outlier neighborhood, out of the mold of what was going on everywhere else in the city. 

I was a real moviegoer then and was finally living in a city that had a lot of repertory theaters that were featuring foreign films, documentaries, things that just weren’t part of the mainstream. The Surf Theatre is one of the places that I went.

Here’s how naive I was. Before seeing San Francisco for the first time, I looked at the map, saw the Outer Sunset and thought, “That’s gotta be the most glamorous place to live,” because I’d spent all my summers in Florida at the beach. I imagined the Great Highway would be like Miami Beach. Its true nature was something I discovered after I moved here.

Because of the mood, the twilight shots of the Beach Motel and the Surf Theatre are both equal favorites because they give the neighborhood an inviting ambience. I was always trying to catch those shots in the vague mood that I wanted. It was a real struggle, because I would have to go out there again and again, because the majority of the time it would be foggy at that time of day. 

It’s cold and foggy out there. One of the concepts that I had was to photograph the Outer Sunset at sunset. I was often going to the neighborhood to see movies at twilight. A lot of times, you don’t get the sun setting over the Pacific or any of that wild color over the sky that I was looking for. 

Instead, I needed to capture simple, ordinary things that were happening in the neighborhood. I wanted to give hints about how the people lived there, but I didn’t want to show the people themselves. That could be found in their clothes hanging on clotheslines, broad views that gave a feel of the streetscape and businesses, and the great, big, gas-guzzling American cars they were driving.

“Outer Sunset 1977–1978” is on view at Black Bird Bookstore and Café, 4541 Irving St., and The Last Straw, 4540 Irving St., through July 7.