San Francisco, always a boom-and-bust town, again finds itself in the cycle — from doom loop to AI boom. This complex history is the subject of a fascinating new show at the de Young Museum, “Boom and Bust: Photographing Northern California,” which features photos from the late 1800s to 2017.
“I never worried that we wouldn’t come back,” said the show’s curator, Sally Martin Katz, in reference to the civic downturn during the pandemic. “If you look through history, we’ve always come back through these periods. Whether it’s economic or environmental, there’s a spirit of resilience here.”
But the show makes clear that even the good economic times can come at a cost. As the Gold Rush was bringing wealth to the newcomers of Northern California, Native tribes were being murdered and run off their ancestral lands; as the timber industry was getting rich off California’s redwoods, the felling of trees permanently hampered the environment; and as the dot-com bubble gussied up SOMA, the people who had called the area home were priced out.
This is Katz’s first show featuring photos from the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection. She previously curated “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” at the de Young, which showcased McCartney’s hobby photography through Beatlemania. The genesis of “Boom and Bust,” she said, came from a common refrain that many San Franciscans heard after the pandemic.
“People on the East Coast would ask, ‘How is San Francisco?’” she said.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a colossal photo by Berkeley photographer Richard Misrach, showing the Oakland hills in the aftermath of the 1991 firestorm — a reminder of how precarious the good life can be here.
What were once green hills flanking a neighborhood have turned to a turquoise gray beneath the ash. The horizon has all but disappeared. Homes have been leveled. And a single derelict car sits hauntingly in the center of the photo.
The photo’s message becomes even stronger as the viewer proceeds to a display case, where, in incredible detail, photographs depict the immediate destruction caused by the 1906 earthquake.
Other images capture the globe-trotting art collections within Victorian homes at the turn of the 20th century, as well as stomach-turning shots from a parapet atop the Bay Bridge during construction.
While artists, museum directors, and gallerists across the city are biting their nails over the decaying state of the arts following a spate of gallery closures and the cancellation of federal funds for local museums, perhaps this show can provide a silver lining. The good times, in some fashion, always seem to come around again.
“Boom and Bust: Photographing Northern California” will show at the de Young Museum through June 7, 2026.