Minor White arrived in San Francisco in July 1946. During the previous decade, the Minnesota native with a background in poetry and botany had documented 19th-century architecture in Portland, Oregon, served with the U.S. Army in the South Pacific, and spent time in New York City, where he met the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. White began teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) while embarking on several new projects. One was the "City of Surf" series, through which he sought to capture something of the city’s frenetic, ever-changing nature. White took upwards of 6,000 photographs for this project, but for unknown reasons he abandoned the idea by 1952.