The photographer Janet Delaney first came to San Francisco in 1967, for the Summer of Love. By the time she began living in the Mission, in the nineteen-eighties, she had learned Spanish and trained herself to recognize moments of quiet revelation in the streets. “I’ve always seen San Francisco as a small place where big things happen,” she says. “There’s a kind of freedom in being on the West Coast, as if your parents aren’t around.” She was an interloper in the Mission, not having been raised there. And yet, like many new arrivals, she found her place—and her subject—by studying the people for whom it was home.

The area was busy and fast-moving then, with domestic culture spilling out onto the public turf. Photographing life in the streets was fluid and spontaneous work—“like shooting from the solar plexus,” Delaney says—and often it was unclear what she had until she got back to her darkroom. In this way, she was capturing, not composing; gathering, not trying to bear out a story. In time, though, a story did form in her photographs, much as a drift grows from accumulated flakes of snow. The story was about the inflow of culture that kept a pluralistic district alive—and the way that this flow drove life into the local streets, and then beyond them, toward a bigger world.