12.07.25: Bay Bridge, framed

‍I like photographing public art, those sidewalk sculptures that dot downtown areas in most major cities. It’s enjoyable capturing images showing how the art pieces interact with buildings and other features typical in urban areas. The art pieces are outliers that often blend nicely with the urban landscape.

‍Cupid’s Span is a giant sculpture in San Francisco, one of a number of pieces of public art along the Embarcadero (Spanish for embankment) that lines the city’s eastern shoreline.  The 60-foot-high sculpture, created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje vanBrugge and installed in late 2002, represents a bow and arrow shooting down at an angle into a small pedestrian park. A section of the bow appears to be buried in the ground.

‍I was intrigued by the sculpture, which seemed a bit random for its location. It’s massive.

‍My first instinct was to get photos of the sculpture with the city’s skyline in the background, so I moved to the east side, with my back to the water, and captured some really nice scenes. I’ve used several of those on my website in the past.

‍Then I moved to the west side, backed away from the sculpture, and took a few photos with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, known by locals as simply the Bay Bridge. Those were nice, but not as interesting as the skyline shots.

‍As I was preparing to leave, I walked toward the south end of the sculpture, where the section of bow coming out of the ground was the lowest. That’s when I noticed how nicely that section framed the Bay Bridge in the background. 

‍Scenes with built-in framing are another of my favorite subjects, so I was hooked. 

‍I really liked the bright, contrasting colors in the scene — the deep orange of the bow, the blue of the sky and the water in San Francisco Bay, the green of the grass in the park and the yellow of the tall grass surrounding the sculpture. The bridge cutting through the middle of the frame tied it all together.

‍According to a statement from the artists on their website:

‍"Inspired by San Francisco's reputation as the home port of Eros, we began our project for a small park on the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay by trying out the subject of Cupid's stereotypical bow and arrow. The first sketches were made of the subject with the bowstring drawn back, poised on the feathers of the arrow, which pointed up to the sky.

‍"When Coosje van Bruggen found this position too stiff and literal, she suggested turning the image upside down: the arrow and the central part of the bow could be buried in the ground, and the tail feathers, usually downplayed, would be the focus of attention. That way the image became metamorphic, looking like both a ship and a tightened version of a suspension bridge, which seemed to us the perfect accompaniment to the site. In addition, the object functioned as a frame for the highly scenic situation, enclosing—depending on where one stood—either the massed buildings of the city's downtown or the wide vista over the water and the Bay Bridge toward the distant mountains.

‍"As a counterpoint to romantic nostalgia, we evoked the mythological account of Eros shooting his arrow into the earth to make it fertile. The sculpture was placed on a hill, where one could imagine the arrow being sunk under the surface of plants and prairie grasses. By slanting the bow's position, Coosje added a sense of acceleration to the Cupid's Span. Seen from its‘stern,’ the bow-as-boat seems to be tacking on its course toward the white tower of the city’s Ferry Building.”

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