From Genevieve Fussell’s article for The New Yorker:
In 1978, Janet Delaney moved to 62 Langton Street, in San Francisco’s South of Market area, a gritty neighborhood where immigrant families lived along narrow streets and worked in nearby factories. Delaney was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute at the time, and she was drawn to the district by its cheap rent and central location. She soon came to believe that the city’s planned redevelopment of the area threatened the neighborhood’s cultural and economic diversity, and, more broadly, that of the city as a whole.
Delaney began taking photographs with a view camera. She initially shot construction sites near her apartment, including the vast Moscone convention center. “Since this twenty-acre site was in the middle of town, I began to wonder what had been bulldozed to make way for it,” she told me. “I climbed out of the construction pit and began to photograph my neighbors and the nearby small businesses.”