I live next to the Oakland Estuary in a mostly-industrial neighbourhood of 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. The Google Map image above shows the approximate center of my immediate neighbourhood; it's an interesting, unusual, and not well-known place, even by Bay Area standards.
I've lived and worked in the area for years (in an old factory that houses my studio and living space), and during
that time I've taken literally thousands of photos of the area and surrounding places like West Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Berkeley, etc. The Around Jingletown site is an attempt to put some of these images up for other people to see; the site includes a photoblog and will eventually include a comprehensive gallery, and other stuff if I get the time. The blog is updated whenever I feel like it (which is typically a couple of times a week), and doesn't pretend to give a comprehensive view of the world around Jingletown (or Jingletown itself, for that matter), just those little bits of what I see and what interests (or obsesses) me. And a lot of the images are just snapshots (sometimes done while trespassing), so don't get too hung up on the technical deficiencies and obvious problems. Note that the date an individual image is posted is almost never the date the photo was taken; I try to include at least the year that the image was taken somewhere in the commentary.
A note on the name "Jingletown": when I first moved here the name wasn't much used by locals (for the first few years I was here I don't remember anyone using it except as a historical footnote in a conversation); it's interesting to see how the name's become a part of the local identity as the neighbourhood grew some sort of self-confidence and started asserting itself as a self-consciously arty or hip place to live. Yes, I'm ambivalent about that, especially since it's now "The Jingletown Arts District", a sure sign that the artists are being forced out of the area to be replaced by galleries (and lifestyle lofts).
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If you want to get hold of me, click
here for a captcha-protected email address. If you want to buy some of the images, see the main site's Buy! page (but there's not much there at the moment), or
get in touch. Similarly, if you want to use one or more of these images for commercial use,
get in touch, and please don't use these images commercially without my explicit permission.
And if you want to see some of my other images, my main HamishReid.com site might provide some food for thought, even though (like most of my web sites) it's hopelessly out of date.
Hamish Reid, Oakland, October 2007 (updated November 2008).
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