There were hordes of people in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Not only is it a holiday weekend, but the show on the art collections of Gertrude Stein and her siblings closes on Tuesday. In a couple of the galleries of the Stein family’s paintings, it got so crowded that gallery-going felt like a contact sport. I took this photo in the lobby near the elevators.
An incident unrelated to the photograph:
A young woman stood by the elevator doors checking tickets: “Tickets please. Tickets? Thank you. Tickets please.” A white man in his sixties brushed by her and went to squeeze in the elevator. “Ticket, sir?” she said, politely but firmly. He exploded at her, and I thought he was a street crazy: talking loudly and incoherently, he gesticulated at her and made it clear that he was going to go up without showing her a ticker. She took a step back, and held up her radio. “I’m going to call security, sir.” He calmed down quite a bit at that. “If I knew where my ticket was,” he spluttered, “I’d — I left it — it’s with my credit card, and I left my credit card….” His voice dropped down to a normal volume. The elevator went up without him, as he apparently explained to the woman checking tickets what he was doing. Next time I looked over, he was getting on the elevator, and she was talking into her radio. A few minutes later, a man in a plaid shirt stood next to her, and she was telling him what had happened. I heard her saying: “All I did was ask if he had his ticket.”
N.B.: The only adjustments I made on the photograph were to adjust the exposure, and to reduce pixel noise.