For decades, the souvenir photography company Fox Movie Flash captured the portraits of people moving through downtown San Francisco.

Vendors—invariably men in red hats with a modified 35mm camera around their necks—shot as many as 1,500 images per roll of film. Some passersby bought copies of their photos. The rest were still imprisoned in celluloid when Joe Selle, the owner of Fox Movie Flash, closed his Market Street office in the mid-1980s.

It was only recently, says Michael Lerner, creative director of Destination Downtown, a public art project by nonprofit Community Arts International, that the collection of 1.3 million images was rediscovered in the basement of the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. This week, the digital art installation will begin projecting 8,500 of them, taken between 1955 and 1986, in the windows of Union Square’s Flood Building.

“So many of these images were taken [right by the Flood Building] so you have this sense of time travel, this resonance,” says Lerner. “It almost feels like bringing them home, like they were wandering ghosts, they were unmoored.”

The cityscape still looks very much the same as it once did, but the people have changed. “At one point, going downtown was a ritual that people looked forward to,” says Lerner. “You would never think of dressing down, you went downtown to see and be seen. It was a time-honored ritual that gradually changed, and you can see that in the photos as they evolve.”

A record of the people who built the city and kept it running, the photos include everyone from interracial couples and queer individuals to men in Navy uniforms and families from every ethnic background. “San Francisco was a huge Naval town but you never see that now except when we have Fleet Week,” he says. “It’s an incredible anthropological record that spans 50 years.”

In this pivotal moment of change in downtown SF, Lerner hopes that the light Destination Downtown sheds on the past will help us to think about the neighborhood’s future. “Every one of those photos has a story. Who are these people, why are they here, where are they going, what are they thinking?”

Maybe, he says, just maybe, by looking to the past we can “better understand what we need going forward.”

// Destination Downtown will be projected in the windows of the Flood Building, 1 Powell St. at the Cable Car Turnaround (Union Square), through October 12; community-arts.org.

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)

(Fox Movie Flash)