By Judith Kahn

Roy Tahtinen conceived of his current photographic series on Valentine’s Day in 2016, when he made “an unintentional pivot” while collecting stones at Ocean Beach.

Instead of pocketing them, he began photographing the heart-shaped stones where they lay, posting one new heart image each day on social media. Since then, he continues to post one photo every day from some corner of the City.

He has always noticed images in objects around him that were not placed there intentionally. For example, he might see a face in a tree, an animal in a cloud, a number in a leaf, or many other shapes that appear in nature or in manufactured objects. Many people have experienced this phenomenon to some degree.

Roy Tahtinen has a knack for seeing hearts wherever he goes. He pairs his heart photos with quotations as “a form of meditation, a method to develop as an artist and an amazing way to connect with people from all over the world.” Courtesy photo.

On that Valentine’s Day, he realized that through photographing these objects in their immediate context, they could be shared more widely. In his ongoing exploration, Tahtinen realized the objects took on added meaning when photographed where they were found. Now, as the photographs become social media posts, many more people around the world can see what Tahtinen sees and form their own impressions.

On a practical level, this also freed him from the habit of collecting found objects and unloading them into the drawers and shelves of his small Sunset District flat.

“I decided I needed to stop this practice when I ran out of places to keep them,” Tahtinen said.

“The concept of focusing on hearts specifically was inspired by Tony Bennet’s song ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ as well as my personal love for this amazing City,” he explained. “So, in exploring how to combine my unique way of seeing things – San Francisco’s connection with hearts, and my love of the City – I decided, ‘If you left your heart in San Francisco, I am going to try to find it.’”

In 2018, he challenged himself to post a photograph of one new heart to Instagram every day.

“This is when I started the series, HeartSFound,” he said. “And this is where things started to get meaningful.”

Tahtinen admits that while he has produced other photographic series, the term “series” might be an understatement with the hearts, which he’s been posting daily for five years.

Tahtinen selects a photograph each morning and pairs it with a quotation that either reflects the image or contrasts with it in a surprising way.

“Personally, it has been a form of meditation, a method to develop as an artist and an amazing way to connect with people from all over the world,” he said.

Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Tahtinen worked in advertising and was looking for creative opportunities before moving here in 2000. He is not a full-time photographer.

“I think any fine arts pursuit is difficult to do full time if you want to pay the bills,” he said.

He said he feels lucky to have found a career that fosters and encourages creativity.

“The (advertising) work that was coming out of San Francisco was so original,” he said.

It was the dot-com boom, with lots of money and creativity behind many thriving brands, such as Levi’s, SF Giants and Williams-Sonoma. In 2022, he started working with the brand design team at Peet’s Coffee, his current position.

Tahtinen is curating his favorite heart images to create a book. He is working through how to compose it, which quotations to use to support the images, and how to produce it.

“I started making various collections and playing around with how photos work together and I am letting that drive the development.”

Tahtinen finds the greatest return on his creativity is “showing other people my perspective of the world and having them appreciate the way I see it. This is validating and rewarding because it is so personal.” He adds, “I am well aware that many parts of our lives seem designed to discourage creativity. So, the first reward of being artists or creatives is the freedom to be ourselves and not fight for permission.”

Seaside Buckwheat at Golden Gate Bridge by Roy Tahtinen.

His other interests are traveling and walking, the latter a daily activity for him. The beauty, diversity and walkability of SF inspire him to “walk more, to explore the City and to slow down and see more of what is around me.”

He describes his hometown of Grand Rapids as “actually a really fantastic place. I intended on moving back after a year or two, but I fell in love with the City and have made San Francisco my home.”

Two of Roy Tahtinen’s photos showing heart-shaped holes he observed in wood and rock carved by natural forces. See a large collection of his work at the Hunt & Gather art gallery at 1108 Irving St. and on his website, heartSFound.art.

Tahtinen posts daily to Instagram and Facebook – @HeartSFound.art and HeartSFound.art, respectively – and Next Door, under Roy Tahtinen, offering a positive, bright spot on the often contentious social media platform. His largest current physical installation is showing in the Sunset District at Hunt & Gather, located at 1108 Irving St. There, you can find framed prints along with bookmarks and greeting cards. Tahtinen’s cards and prints are also found in little shops around San Francisco, but he hopes to find wider distribution.

Tahtinen said his book will be a love note to San Francisco.

“I am inspired by those who left their hearts here,” he said. “There are so many shapes a heart can come in. It can be broken or whole. Wet or dry. Positive or negative. Symmetrical or eclectic. All beautiful in their own way. So, the book is also a celebration of diversity and inclusion. We are all so different, yet at the same time, we are all the same.”

See his work at heartsfound.art.

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District can’t afford
Concord High change

In regard to Concord High changing their mascot from the “Minutemen” to the “Bears,” I don’t understand the need for it. Minutemen were heroes. But my main concern is the cost. I work at an MDUSD school where every week the plumbing fails or the air/heat breaks down. The list is never-ending.

The cost to reoutfit the band alone would be over $100,000. If you include football and all the sports uniforms … I can’t even imagine.

Our schools are deteriorating. We need to address our infrastructure. Please. Let common sense prevail.

Toni Keosian
Concord

Airport expansion bad
news for environment

Re: “Oakland airport’s expansion will exacerbate climate change, groups say” (Page A1, Aug. 15).

The planned expansion of the Oakland airport, which is used primarily for short-haul flights, will increase demand and use of the airport and worsen pollution and the climate crisis.

It is disingenuous to claim that Oakland flights would increase anyway without the project. The increased capacity would allow airlines to add more flights daily, causing increased stress-inducing noise pollution and small particulate emissions among surrounding low-income communities that already suffer massive environmental injustice.

We must choose other scenarios for meeting the high demand for travel, especially for short-haul distances. Most of this traffic would be better served by high-speed rail, eliminating the additional air and noise pollution from even more frequent flights across Oakland and Alameda.

Fully 11% of California’s CO2 emissions come from air travel. Has the climate crisis not yet convinced officials and the public that we have to change our ways?

Susan Wright
Oakland

Keep spotlight on
Santa Rita Jail deaths

Re: “Lawmakers seek jail death transparency” (Page B2, Aug. 16).

The Interfaith Coalition for Justice in Our Jails appreciates your article, which focused on the San Diego Jail. This devastating problem lives here at the Alameda County jail, with over 70 deaths since 2014. We have conducted three somber rallies, calling on county supervisors to take some leadership on jail conditions.

As in San Diego, most deaths occur to people within the first traumatic days and weeks of incarceration, before they are even charged. Guards and the medical service contractor fail to properly handle mental illness and substance abuse. And the dual sheriff/coroner role often compromises family/community access to death information. The movie “What Happened to DuJuan Armstrong?” documents these issues.

We urge continued coverage of this problem, particularly for our Santa Rita Jail.

Karen Rachels
Oakland

Moms for Liberty
don’t speak for all

Re: “‘Fear and hate are the issue’” (Page A1, Aug. 17).

To Moms for Liberty: You don’t speak “for America.”

You are an extremist minority group. You hurt innocent people you don’t know, often children, and you don’t care. You have the right to speak your distorted and hateful messages, but that right does not extend to actions. It’s sad we have to block your book bans and racist curricula revision and gender strictures with legislation — such a waste of resources just to extinguish your hate.

My suggestion: Put a sock in it.

Steven James
Walnut Creek

Put Pink Poodle
story to bed

I’m amazed at how much effort and print has gone into the investigation of the supposed Pink Poodle incident regarding the San Jose Fire Department.

I understand that those in certain sectors of our public safety should always maintain a quality standard. In this case, no one was assaulted, nobody’s house burned down, there were no egregious text messages, just a bikini-clad woman stepping off a fire truck. Meanwhile, there are unsolved freeway shootings and homicides, carjackings and sideshows happening all over the Bay Area. If an emergency came up during their “joy ride” of 20 minutes, I seriously doubt that would decrease their response time.

Let’s focus on the real problems and put the Pink Poodle to bed.

Kevin Moore
Livermore

Don’t give Trump
free advertising

It’s happening again. Donald Trump makes headlines in our newspapers and other media on a regular basis. This gives him free advertising not available to many who do not support him.

Free advertising won him the election in 2016. What a disaster for American democracy. Did he Make America Great Again? He doesn’t read, he cannot spell, he does not pay his bills with his own money. He often chooses to ignore his own lawyers. His ego is his entire life’s focus. I believe strongly that we cannot afford to provide him with a position of power.

I appreciate the responsibility of the media to report the news objectively to the American people. I would suggest, in fairness to others, that news pertaining to Trump be allocated to inside pages of the newspaper and that it be presented without pictures. I strongly disapprove of the free publicity available to this man.

Judy Malinowski
Livermore

Earth’s climate can’t
take GOP agenda

Re: “Far-right climate strategy: Drill more” (Page A1, Aug. 6).

While the world is burning and flooding, the Republican plan for America is to repeal environmental regulations and drill, drill, drill.

They would have us believe that the most crucial issue facing us is that some guy in San Francisco is wearing a dress. It’s become clear that voting Republican is voting for global suicide.

Jim Hogan
El Sobrante

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Here’s what the $162 million bond measure promised to do in 2010: “enhance safety, fire detection and security systems, improve energy efficiency, replace outdated electrical, plumbing and heating systems.”

So, in another eight to 10 years they’ll be back to solve the same issues … again?

They always include “tech” in the bond measures. Tech is usually obsolete in five to six years, but bonds last 25 to 30 years.

Ever buy a computer and take out a loan for 25 to 30 years to pay for it?

nuts, right? But that’s exactly what the district wants to do. Nuts!

With the loss of 697 students since the 2016-17 school year, you’d expect to see fewer teachers, but the district added eight teachers (2018-19 school year according to the latest figures).

And the number of administrators is up from 28 in 2016-17 to 35 in 2018-19 (latest figures).

The ADA spending for the district is 109% of the statewide average at $16,962. The district is above average in cost, but below average in academics … by a lot.

Around 53% of students are below grade level in English. Around 62% of students are below grade level in math. And bond money can’t be spent on hiring teachers that are more qualified/better trained.

With the $430 million bond measure, per student, comes to $52,554 plus 30 to 40 years of interest payments.

Parent are voting with their feet and removing their children from this failure of a school district.

Just say no to higher taxes.

The letter writer is the president of the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association.

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Thom Gunn had a front row seat for LGBT San Francisco development. The poet graduated from Cambridge, published his first volume of poetry (Fighting Terms) and moved to the United States in 1954. At this point he was already leading as openly gay a life as it was possible at the time. When he moved to the United States, he not only went to Stanford, but followed Mike Kitay, his lifelong partner.

Thom Gunn’s letters, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer and published by Faber & Faber in March 2021, are both an intimate portrait of the poet and a window into the development of what later became gay and leather culture and the rise the hippies and the drug culture. On the way we are spoiled with Gunn’s encounters with well-known writers such as Paul Bowles, Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, WH Auden and many others.

Cover for the hardcover edition of ‘The Letters of Thom Gunn’

Gunn had an immediate impact when he arrived in Palo Alto. A 1954 letter to actor Tony White mentions the couple Tom and Charlotte Herbold, and a footnote to them tells us:

“Tom and Charlotte Herbold took TG to his first gay bar, the Black Cat in San Francisco. They went with a woman named Mary, TG’s ‘date’. The bar, TG said to Robert Prager, “was a huge revelation for me. Gay bars were fun! Though Mary kept saying,” Those poor men. I feel so sorry for you. “I didn’t feel sorry for you. I could see they were having fun. And I realized I could have fun there too, so I went back there by myself the next night. ‘”

White, whom Gunn knew from Cambridge, was one of Gunn’s frequent correspondents. Gunn’s letters are direct, intimate, and often quite funny. Describing an early drug experience, he tells White in a letter written from Oakland in 1958:

“I forgot to tell you. A few weeks ago I met Paul Bowles, a little (and I think bad) American writer. He looks like a Ponce but doesn’t act like one. And he gave me a mescaline (sic) pill (the results of which are similar to those of hashish (sic) “

The letters portray gay life in the 50s and 60s from Gunn’s international perspective. In a letter from Berlin in 1960 to the British poet and editor John Lehmann, he discusses the difference between European and American gay bars:

“I find queer bars outside America very epizen, very girlish. I think that only in America there are bars exclusively for the butch (as opposed to money-butch). But there are many attractive Germans outside of the bars – I don’t mean directly outside, I mean everywhere. “

A young Oliver Sacks

Wolf in motion
This perspective also shows that what came to be known as “sex tourism” was already in place and sometimes resulted in lifelong friendships. Two letters to Kitay in 1961 are a good example of this. In the first he tells of a meeting at Jack’s on the Waterfront (111 Embarcadero):

“There’s an odd, colossal big London Jew named Wolf, a medical student and friend of Jonathan Miller, who says my poetry changed his life – it got him to buy a bike and wear leather, and so does he tearing around like a whirlwind – and came here to be a doctor because I live here. “

The wolf in question is Oliver Wolf Sacks. Gunn’s lifelong influence on him is undeniable: Sacks titled his 2015 autobiography On The Move: A Life based on Gunn’s 1955 poem “On The Move” about leather boys on motorcycles.

In the second letter, Gunn reveals that his encounter with Sacks wasn’t all literary:

“Yeah, I did it with Wolf, and it wasn’t justifiable as I find him extremely unattractive. Well, not extremely, and some people get crazy about him, but I like something (a) nicer and (b) more But for the first time in my life I did what I think was so wrong, that is, slept with someone because they were so devoted, which I find really immoral, the one form of sexual immorality, but it literally came because of me and brought a bike that he still rides all the time because of me. “

Regardless of the failed sexual encounter, Sacks and Gunn formed a lifelong friendship in which Gunn encouraged Sacks’ writing.

The original stud bar

Pop & Stud
The letters also provide a unique glimpse into the rise of pop culture characters from LGBT culture. In a 1963 letter to Kitay, he discussed going to a concert with Chuck Arnett whose mural in the toolbox would frame the opening pages of the Life magazine article “Homosexuality in America” ​​the following year:

“Yesterday we were at the Hungry Eye with Barbra Streisand, a very lovable singer with a fine manner, who you have probably already heard of. The Tool Box bartender Chuck we dated said it was one of their best nights. He was with her four times. “

Since Gunn was passionate about the nightlife of San Francisco, he covers topics that are not easy to find elsewhere. In a 1966 letter to the literary critic and professor Tony Tanner, he talks about the Capri (1326 Grant):

“We – we all – have found a bar that suits us all, me Mike Don, Bryan and you two too. We’re hiding them from Tom Gee and all. It’s the only truly bisexual bar I’ve ever known and is very wild and delightful as well as being close by – on Grant Avenue. “

The Don mentioned in this letter is Don Doody, whom Gunn met at Gordon’s (840 Sansome) in 1961. Doody was a bartender at Tool Box and later at Stud, where he hosted LSD parties known as Saturnalia, environments designed by Arnett in the late 1960s. He appears prominently in the letters, as in this 1968 letter to Tanner:

“Don did a great job with Stud. There are more murals now, there is dancing and socializing, and it is probably the busiest bar in town. He’s moving to the rooms upstairs (where we stayed your first night, remember) Chuck Arnett and some other nice people. Apparently there are 16 rooms up there! “

Thom Gunn in the 1990s

In another letter from 1968 to Tanner, Gunn describes one of the Saturnalia parties:

“The Stud closed for one night to have a bar party for its 150 closest friends. The place was decorated with polyethylene to look like some sort of Venus Fingal Cave, with flexible stalactites, etc. And everyone including Mike and told me it was the best party they ever went to. One thing that helped was they all got acid, so about 70 of us were on a pretty tough trip. “

For a while, it seems that Stud was Gunn’s favorite pub and he met out of town friends there. In a letter to Tanner from 1970, he relates:

“I met Mark and David Hockney at the stud. They wanted to go to a bunch of new bars that they’d heard about. I said, ‘Oh, these bars are awful, they’re very plastic.’ David Hockney said, ‘But we like plastic.’ “

The content of The Letters of Thom Gunn is far wider than the space here allows for discussion. There is also a wonderful account of Gunn’s literary career (which I barely touched). With the window these letters alone give on gay culture before Stonewall in San Francisco, this book is a treasure and deserves to be read by anyone interested in this era.

Letter books are often difficult to sell to readers because they depend on both the personality of the author and his communication skills. In this way The Letters of Thom Gunn becomes a living success. He was both a charming and humorous letter writer and this book is a pleasure to read.

Help keep the Bay Area Reporter going through these troubled times. To support local, independent LGBTQ journalism, you should become a BAR member.

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I grew up in South San Francisco and just followed my husband’s employer.

While we currently live in Sunnyvale, I lived in South San Francisco for the first 32 years of my life (my husband was also an SSF resident). I grew up in this district.

Bronsteins was the first place I was allowed to go alone. We regularly return to “home” to see how some areas have developed and to look at the old and familiar areas (see always Bronstein Music). This area has made some changes but I would be very sad to see it (especially by the city council). I grew up on Grand Avenue and Pine Terrace. These areas are part of my life soul.

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