About Me
Who am I?
I'm Catherine Brosnan. San Francisco is my hometown, and I've loved this iconic, diverse, and visually rich city from my earliest memories as a child growing up in Ingleside Terraces and Ocean View. I love to wander its neighborhoods, searching for subjects that excite me visually, and make compositions that somehow express the mood and feeling of that excitement. I work exclusively in black and white, using a Leica Monochrom camera. I strive for the most direct, immediate way of seeing, and my 50mm Summilux has become an extension of my eyes and imagination.
Why seeingsanfrancisco?
Edward Weston, whose Daybooks record his experience during his halcyon Carmel years, would sometimes refer to a particular image as "well seen." That was his code for photographic success. His sharp, critical eye had a simple, binary way of judging a photograph. It was either well seen, or not. How simple, direct, clean, and yet reserved! I loved it the moment I heard it, and that's what I'm striving for. Not great, not awesome, not amazing, not powerful, not stunning, not spectacular, not even necessarily beautiful. Just well seen.
While the vast majority of my images are from the districts within the 49 square miles of San Francisco, a few here and there are from other Bay Area cities (Burlingame, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and so forth).
How I got here
My husband has been walking the streets of San Francisco, pursing his long-term photography project for about 15 years. For many years I would occasionally accompany him on these walks, mainly on the weekends, acting as his driver, helper, security officer, and sometimes lens-schlepping assistant. But starting around 2018 or so, I gradually played an increasingly active role. I would scout locations and point out subjects I knew he would find interesting. My role became something close to artistic advisor or even art director: “Come over here and see what you can do with this house. Stand here and focus on that detail!” And he came to rely heavily on me to help him edit his ever-growing body of work—which as I write in 2026, now includes 1800 final images selected from 63,000 captures.
A few years ago he began to encourage me to take up the camera myself. His kind and strong encouragement, his trust in my visual sense, and his growing appreciation of my compositional instincts finally took root. So, somewhere around September 2024, he lost a driver, assistant, art director, and creative consultant, but gained a colleague. I experimented with cameras and lenses for a few months, enjoyed the process, but the Sony A7R5 I was using just didn’t work for me. Despite (or possibly because of) its great capability and mind-boggling depth of features, it felt like the camera was controlling me rather than the other way around.
Also, as much as I love color, I began to find it distracting in the compositions I was interested in making. Everything came together when I began to use the Monochrom with a single lens, the marvelous 50mm Summilux ASPH. There are 47 Sony images, converted to b/w, in the early part of my folio, but as soon as I wrapped my mind and hands around the M, I lost interest in other cameras. So, beyond an early point (can you guess where?), all the images shown here begin with a Monochrom capture.
How you can reach me
seeingsanfrancisco@outlook.com