About the Around Jingletown Website

Around Jingletown

Images of Oakland's Jingletown, San Antonio, Fruitvale, and Downtown Districts, Oakland Estuary, West Oakland, and further afield…

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I live next to the Oakland Estuary in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, on the border of the Jingletown and San Antonio districts of East Oakland, near Union Point, Fruitvale, and Alameda. It's a part of Oakland that's not well known even to many Oaklanders, an uneasy and changing mixture of heavy industry, wholesale markets and suppliers, specialist small businesses (boatyards, propeller manufacturers, sailmakers, precision machinists, blacksmiths, body shops, etc.), artists, artisans, lifestyle lofts, and offices. Jingletown itself has recently become a self-consciously hip arts area, and lately the rents and the storefronts have reflected this, with a relentless gentrification that's slowly turning what was once a low-rent industrial area into yet another expensive residential enclave. The artists will meanwhile just move on (as they did in San Francisco).

I've lived and worked in the area for years, and during that time I've taken literally thousands of photos — digital and film — of the area with everything from an old Kodak DC290 digital snapshot camera to my even-older Sinar 4x5 view camera. I still take photos pretty much every few days, but in the last few years it's usually been with an old Canon S70 point-and-shoot or a Nikon D2X DSLR slung into my bag when I leave my studio.

The Around Jingletown website is basically a collection of these photos made over the years, centered around Jingletown, Alameda, Fruitvale, and the Estuary, but also sometimes including places like Downtown and West Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, etc. The images are deliberately just (mostly) everyday snapshots, a record of the way it all looks and looked; there's no striving for Art or gritty realism or anything portentous or pretentious like that.The images are also not meant to be any sort of comprehensive or definitive view of the area; they're mostly just the byproduct of the walk to BART or across Park Street Bridge, or riding my bike up the Embarcadero, or having lunch at Cafe Andalus, and concentrate / obsess on some fairly obvious local landmarks and themes to the exclusion of others. This will probably irritate Jingletown purists (there'll always be some site or building or secret little enclave that locals will point out I've missed), but hell, that's their problem, not mine.

The images concentrate mostly on the built and natural environment rather than the people, but sometimes actual residents are shown or even named. In reality, though, I'm waiting to do a different site and blog for the people shots, something that may take a lot more time to get together (it's hard to get all those releases retroactively…).

Unless otherwise noted, virtually all the images are only lightly edited, mostly for contrast and cropping, etc., i.e. I haven't done anything extreme or misleading: I hate cropping out things like telegraph poles or wires — they're so much a part of the environment here that cropping or erasing them kind of also erases the whole point of an image.

The site has both a photo blog and a set of galleries. The blog is updated once or twice a week (i.e. whenever I feel like it), and sometimes includes my own comments about the image when it's posted; there's not necessarily any order or theme to the images, and some of them may be literally a decade old, others just straight out of the camera. The galleries are arranged more thematically, and are usually added-to only slowly and haphazardly; they also typically include slideshow versions of the blog images.

Some of the images here can be purchased in one form or another through the Buy! page which takes you to the associated Cafepress and / or Imagekind store pages.

Hamish Reid, October 2007.

(Hamish Reid is a photographer, writer, and software engineer living in East Oakland, California).