Fred Lyon is 92 years old and has photographed his hometown, San Francisco, for more than 70 years. His rich black-and-white scenes conjure a bygone era, when flash powder still existed, being alone with your thoughts was common, and the famed cable cars were public transportation for locals, rather than rolling tourist traps headed to Fisherman’s Wharf.  A large selection of these amazing photographs, so incongruous with today’s lifestyle, is being exhibited at the Leica Gallery in San Francisco through Oct. 21, and collectively they do the city’s history proud.  Mr. Lyon came by his love of photography early, if indirectly, when he noticed a friend, who had a real 2 1/4 camera rather than a Kodak Brownie, was attracting a lot of attention from the girls in school. He was impressed.  “At that point,” he said, “as with a lot of my later life, much of my motivation was how to get girls. I thought if I had a camera, maybe I could emulate his success.”  He left high school at 14, briefly worked for a local commercial photographer and then studied photography at the Art Center in Los Angeles. One of the instructors there was Ansel Adams, another San Francisco photographer uninterested in a traditional education. (And apparently he made a mean Old-Fashioned.) Adams, a printing guru famed for creating the zone system, once gave him an obscure but helpful bit of advice after he showed off a still-wet print from darkroom. Young Fred Lyon asked the master what he thought.  “He looked at it and said, ‘Hmmm, the reality of the light does not exist,’ ” Mr. Lyon recalled. “I said, ‘Thank you very much,’ went back into the lab and said, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ It meant I was making dark prints. People like Bill Brandt made dark prints to great advantage, but I hadn’t developed to that point.”  After working as a Navy photographer, Mr. Lyon eventually found the success he had craved. He worked commercially and editorially for decades, photographing five presidents for publications like Time and Life. As an artist, he had San Francisco as his muse, with its thick fog, steep hills and “rakish” attitude.  The city is the subject of his work, as much as its inhabitants. He has been called the San Francisco Brassai (whom he knew), and it’s not difficult to see why. In “Land’s End, Foggy Night, San Francisco, 1953,” you’re transported into a grayscale universe. Car headlights backlight an automobile; its front end juts into the sidewalk as the moist Pacific air envelops everything.  A couple walks past, down the hill, with a flashlight that spotlights the curb, as glowing light illuminates the rowhouses in the left of the frame (Slide 2). It is one magical photograph. (If you happen to disagree, you’re wrong.)  Throughout the images, we see bridges and sailors, fishermen and cops. Children play, jazz musicians wail, and neon signs pop in the night on the Barbary Coast. It was all true to the life Mr. Lyon was living, back when he couldn’t afford to drink all night, so he would throw back a few and then go out with his camera. When it was time to prowl, he would call his friend Herb Caen, the quintessential San Francisco columnist (Slide 10), for a night out.  “I’d say, ‘Herb, we’ve got to go out and do it again.’ He didn’t mind,” Mr. Lyon said. “He knew all the ladies. We were in the jazz joints. The jazz scene was terrific.”  The exhibition at the Leica Gallery was organized in part by Peter Fetterman, who became his dealer years ago. It was not until after Mr. Lyon turned 80, however, that he even tried to exhibit and sell his prints. It simply wasn’t done in the old days, but when much of his commercial work dried up, outside of some clients in the wine industry, he decided to reinvent himself.  San Francisco, too, has undergone a reinvention lately, with the much-publicized arrival of residents and money from nearby Silicon Valley. But with a longer-term perspective than most of us have, Fred Lyon is not concerned for the future of his beloved city, saying “every city that’s really alive has to keep changing.”  There is one change he dislikes, though, as it marks the 21st century as profoundly different from a more naïve time. (No, it’s not the digital revolution, which he confidently embraces.) It’s that fewer families live in San Francisco now, and the ones who do keep their children on tighter leashes.  “What I really miss is the kids playing in the street,” he said. “That was a constant source of joy for me. I don’t know where they’ve gone. Their parents don’t allow them out. It just doesn’t happen. The kids were always great. They’d laugh at this silly guy with the camera, and know I really wanted to get in their games with them. And indeed I did.”  Correction: An earlier picture caption (slide 15) was dated incorrectly. It was taken in the 1970s, not the 1940s.  Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor.  Follow @jblauphoto, @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.
Fred Lyons’s longtime muse is his hometown, San Francisco, whose streets and people have always beckoned him to dive in with camera in hand, day or night.