Christopher Hall’s photos of parked cars around San Francisco seem drawn from some dreamy bygone era.

But the scenes — a moody 1960s Ford Mustang parked outside a warehouse, a Rolls Royce in front of “Don Ramon’s” Mexican restaurant — were captured squarely in the age of Twitter and Facebook.

They are not staged. Hall, 60, who works in mental health care by day, heads out early mornings with a medium format film camera in search of vintage cars on the street. Sometimes, he said, he gets lucky, stumbling upon a perfect arrangement of color, texture, and nostalgia. Often though, a Tesla or Amazon delivery truck intrudes on the picture, forcing him to come back until it’s lined up the way he wants it.

“Ideally,” Hall said, “I’m trying to find a scene where you have to question, ‘Is this 1958 or is this 2021?'”

The resulting body of work captures a sort of echo from San Francisco’s past, faded by time but still embedded in the landscape.

Below, see a selection of Hall’s images, and many more in his “Streets of San Francisco” Flickr album.

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