On the Golden Gate, International Orange, and what it means to add one more slide to a 90-year conversation

Retrospect Studio ArtAmericana & LandmarksGolden Gate Bridge

On the morning of May 27, 1937, nearly 200,000 people walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on Pedestrian Day - the first day the span was open to the public, before cars were admitted the following afternoon. Some had waited their whole adult lives for the crossing. The bridge had been proposed for decades, called impossible by engineers, dismissed as a fantasy by the U.S. War Department, and nearly abandoned in the Depression. And now here it was, and here they were, 200,000 people paying a quarter each to walk 1.7 miles above the Pacific and come back.

That morning is the beginning of the bridge's photographic life, though the camera had been circling the Golden Gate long before the bridge arrived. By the time the span opened, it had already been documented in every stage of its four-year construction - cables spun, towers rising through fog, workers crossing catwalks above the bay. Since that Pedestrian Day, it has never stopped being photographed. Britannica calls it simply "the most photographed bridge in the world." The qualification, after a while, feels redundant. There is only one bridge whose image you can conjure without being told which bridge.

Before the Bridge: Ansel Adams and the Strait

Ansel Adams was born in 1902 in a house in the sand dunes near the Golden Gate - not the bridge, which did not yet exist, but the strait itself, the three-mile gap between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay that the bridge would one day span. He described his earliest memories as the low-rolling fog over the Golden Gate, and in a meaningful sense the bridge's most famous location was his childhood backyard. In 1932, a year before construction began, he saw storm clouds rolling in from the north on a winter morning and drove to the edge of Seacliff with his 8x10 camera. The image he made - the strait without the bridge, the headlands dark and massive, the fog tearing across the gap - is one of the most reproduced photographs in the history of the medium.

A year later, ground was broken. When the bridge was complete in 1937, Adams photographed it from Baker Beach, capturing the towers in the kind of low, swirling fog that would define the site's visual character for the next century. He had watched the strait his whole life; he knew its light in a way that no visiting photographer could replicate. His images set a visual standard for the Golden Gate - the particular quality of that location, where the Pacific meets the bay and the fog moves through the gap on its own timetable - that every subsequent photographer has been working in the shadow of, whether they knew it or not.

Ansel Adams on photographing the Golden Gate, 1932

"One beautiful storm-clearing morning, I looked out the window of our San Francisco home and saw magnificent clouds rolling from the north over the Golden Gate. I grabbed the 8×10 equipment and drove to the end of 32nd Avenue at the edge of Seacliff."

The Accidental Color

The Golden Gate Bridge was nearly painted black with yellow stripes. That was the U.S. Navy's preference - maximum visibility for aircraft and ships, zero concern for aesthetics. It was also considered in aluminum gray, which would have blended it seamlessly into the fog. What stopped both proposals was a consulting architect named Irving Morrow, who noticed that the steel arriving at the construction site was coated in a reddish-orange primer applied to prevent rust during transit. The color struck him immediately as right - warm enough to read against the cold grays and blues of the bay, visible in fog without being garish, harmonious with the gold and green of the surrounding hills.

Morrow had to convince the Department of War, which was the permitting authority. He eventually prevailed, and the color - formalized as International Orange - became not just the bridge's surface but its identity. It is not a coincidence that International Orange photographs extraordinarily well. Against the blue-gray of the bay, against the white of the fog, against the deep green of the Marin headlands, the color performs differently in every condition and reads as pure signal in all of them. Morrow had also added vertical fluting to the bridge towers - a detail drawn from Art Deco aesthetics - which creates dramatic, changing shadows as the light moves across the structure throughout the day. The bridge was designed, at least in part, to be a sculpture. The camera has been proving him right ever since.

International Orange - the accidental color

Irving Morrow noticed the reddish-orange construction primer on incoming steel in the early 1930s and championed it over the Navy's preferred black-and-yellow scheme. He had to petition the Department of War for approval. The color has been continuously maintained ever since - the bridge requires 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of paint annually - and has been inseparable from the structure's identity for nearly ninety years.

4,200ft

Main span length - the longest in the world at opening, surpassed only in 1964

746ft

Tower height above water - the bridge remained the tallest suspension bridge until 1998

200k

People who walked the bridge on Pedestrian Day, May 27, 1937, at 25 cents each

What Kodachrome Did for International Orange

There is a specific relationship between the Golden Gate's color and the Kodachrome film stock that dominated American photography from the 1940s through the 1970s. Kodachrome was celebrated for its rendering of warm reds and oranges - the dye chemistry produced a saturation and depth in the red channel that no other consumer film matched. Photographs of the bridge on Kodachrome from the 1950s and '60s have a color temperature that the bridge's own paint department cannot replicate in person: the towers glow rather than simply appear red, the color separates cleanly from the sky and water, and the film grain adds a texture that makes the whole image feel warm even when the sky behind the bridge is the classic San Francisco gray.

This is part of what the slides in the Golden Gate section of the Americana & Landmarks collection are: documents of a color relationship that no longer exists in quite that form. Digital sensors do not render International Orange the way Kodachrome did. The physics are different, and so is the experience of looking. A fine art print made from a well-exposed Kodachrome slide of the Golden Gate Bridge is not simply a vintage photograph - it is a record of a specific optical event, the way that particular film stock responded to that particular color in that particular light, at a moment when the bridge was new enough that people still drove across it for the sake of crossing it rather than because they had somewhere to be on the other side.

"Although other bridges have since surpassed it in size, it remains incomparable in the magnificence of its setting."

• Encyclopædia Britannica on the Golden Gate Bridge

A Collection That Will Keep Growing

The Golden Gate section of the Americana & Landmarks collection is deliberately open-ended. The bridge has been photographed from every angle, in every season, in every weather condition, at every hour of the day for nearly ninety years - and the photographic archive it has generated is genuinely inexhaustible. There is always another angle that catches the light differently, another period of the bridge's life that hasn't been printed, another slide that turns up in an estate collection with a viewpoint nobody has thought to print before.

What I look for is specificity. Not the iconic shot - the bridge in full, towers and cables and bay - but the images that locate themselves in a precise moment of the bridge's long life: the period-correct cars crossing in the 1950s, the particular width of the fog on a specific winter afternoon, the angle from Fort Point where the arch of the bridge frames the sky behind it and the whole structure seems to be launching itself into the air. Those are the prints I add. The collection will grow as I find them, and the plan is to keep finding them for a long time.

The Golden Gate Bridge prints are part of the Americana & Landmarks collection at Retrospect Studio Art - an archive of vintage 35mm slides documenting America's most significant landscapes and structures. New Golden Gate additions are added as exceptional slides are sourced.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Encyclopædia Britannica. "Golden Gate Bridge." On the bridge's completion in 1937 as the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world, and its status as the most photographed bridge on earth.
2. Library of Congress, "Today in History: May 27." On Pedestrian Day, May 27, 1937 - 200,000 people crossing at 25 cents each - and President Roosevelt's telegraph key opening the bridge to vehicles the following day.
3. The Ansel Adams Gallery. "The Golden Gate, Before and After the Bridge." articles.anseladams.com. Adams's own account of the 1932 photograph: "One beautiful storm-clearing morning… I grabbed the 8×10 equipment and drove to the end of 32nd Avenue."
4. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. "The Golden Gate (Before Construction of the Bridge)," Ansel Adams Collection, 1932. On Adams's childhood home near the strait and the context of the 1932 image.
5. PBS American Experience. "Irving Morrow: An Art Deco Sculpture." On Morrow's advocacy for International Orange, the Navy's black-and-yellow alternative, the vertical fluting on the towers, and Morrow's conception of the bridge as sculpture.
6. NPR. "The Golden Gate Bridge's Accidental Color," April 26, 2011. On Irving Morrow noticing the reddish-orange primer on incoming steel and petitioning the Department of War for approval.
7. InsideHook. "A Brief History of Photographing the Golden Gate Bridge," January 2023. On Ted Huggins's early documentation of the bridge and Ansel Adams's Baker Beach photograph of 1953.
8. Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District. On the annual maintenance of International Orange - approximately 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of paint per year - as of 2024.