Laura Morton: Wild West Tech, inside the San Francisco boom

Wild West Tech

Stories of enormous fortunes made in technology brought a new gold rush to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and Morton photographed the people who arrived hoping to launch a successful start-up or to join the right company at the right moment. The framing is deliberate: a rush, with the social structure a rush produces.

The lives she documented are unusually intertwined. Founders live with each other, network with one another, compete with everyone and go out together. Morton photographed entrepreneurs sleeping in their offices because they could not afford rent, visited the co-working spaces most of these companies emerge from, and gained access to the co-living houses sometimes called hacker hostels, where large groups of founders share a single building.

The project also asks a question it does not answer. At the time of the work, venture capital firms were willing to take large risks on young technology companies, making it one of the best moments in history for a start-up to raise money — and raising the obvious question of whether this was another bubble and whether uncontrolled growth of that kind can be sustained. For every success story there were many more failures, and yet, as Morton observed, most of the people involved believed the industry to be a genuine meritocracy in which those who deserve to succeed will.

A photojournalist working on wealth

Morton is a freelance photojournalist based in San Francisco whose personal work focuses on wealth and the issues that surround it. Wild West Tech is one project in that longer line, and the consistency is what makes it more than a technology story: the subject is money and the behaviour it produces, photographed in the place where the money happened to be.

She has been published in German GEO, Newsweek Japan, the British Journal of Photography, 6 Mois, National Geographic Traveler France, IO Donna, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among other titles.

Funding, background and earlier work

In 2014 Morton received a grant from the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund to begin Wild West Tech — a useful illustration of how a project of this kind starts, since access to co-living houses and offices is bought with time rather than equipment.

Born in Maryland in 1984, she grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and began pursuing photojournalism as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 2006 with a degree in political science and journalism.

Her earlier series The Social Stage, on San Francisco's high-society culture, was recognised in the 2012 PDN Photo Annual and won the 2013 Hearst 8x10 Photography Biennial. She was also a winner of the 2013 Magenta Flash Forward emerging photographers exchange.

The political science half of Morton's degree shows in how the project is framed. Wild West Tech is not a technology story with people in it; it is a study of a speculative economy observed through the domestic arrangements it produces — who sleeps where, who shares a kitchen with whom, and what a person is willing to accept in exchange for a chance at a stake.

Read a decade later, the open question in the work has been partly answered, which is the ordinary fate of documentary about a boom. What survives is the sociology: the co-living house, the office floor, the belief in meritocracy held by people the system had not yet sorted.

It is also worth noticing what the project refuses to photograph. The visual clichés of the industry — the keynote stage, the product launch, the successful founder at the desk — are almost entirely absent, because they are the industry's self-portrait and Morton's subject is the gap between that self-portrait and the living arrangements underneath it. Working the domestic side of the boom had a practical cost: a hacker hostel admits a photographer on trust, not on a press pass, and the pictures could only be made after the residents stopped registering the camera. That is the same access economics as any long-form documentary project, transplanted to a subject the business press was covering daily from the other side. The result reads less like technology journalism and more like the classic photographic studies of company towns — which, in Morton's framing, is exactly what San Francisco had become.