It was a quieter first Thursday at 49 Geary than some others in recent memory, which I'm going to chalk up to the glorious weather outside rather than lack of excitement inside. The fourth floor enjoyed something closer to a party atmosphere due to two notable openings, Fan Ho's "A Hong Kong Memoir" at Modernbook Gallery and Isa Leshko's "Thrills and Chills" at Corden Potts, as well as the continuing buzz around Richard Learoyd's acclaimed "Presences" at Fraenkel.

Though sparser than last month's, the crowd was encouragingly diverse in age, race, and even tongue. The corridors of the building are always the most happening place on opening nights, and last night they hosted tanned, makeupless, braless gamines growling at each other in French, middle-aged Italian women wearing lots of makeup and, one can assume, sufficient underpinnings, bickering (although it always sounds like bickering, doesn't it?) with their men. Clusters of young Americans propped themselves up on Golgothan stilettos, clutching their plastic cups of white wine with one hand and texting virtuosically with the other. Some hood-ish-looking young men in 'do-rags dragged their pants behind them from gallery to gallery. Many people had expensive-looking priapic-lensed cameras dangling from their necks.

Next: Fan Ho puts the "extra" in "extraordinary."

Fan Ho's photographs from the 1950s and '60s are fascinating for the city life they depict and also for his inventiveness with composition. Several modern prints in the exhibit he created by scanning multiple negatives he had taken in the 1950s, or the same negative multiple times, and merging them together in Photoshop.

The results are strikingly Art Deco, an ordinary bustling narrow market street is now all jagged edges bursting out of a still center. Even unaltered images show a feeling for making visual impact using strong geometric shapes. A woman in a cheongsam stands against the wall of a tall, windowless white building. An adjacent wall casts a diagonal shadow ending at her feet, which she stares at dejectedly. Or at least I think what I'm seeing is dejection; such is the effect of the vast white walls, the sharp harsh light and darkness, the minuteness of the lonely figure at the bottom.

Next: Doug Rickard rechannels Google to expose America.

Doug Rickard's "A New American Picture" at Stephen Wirtz Gallery has been extended through June 18. These are images of different neighborhoods, mostly poor, mostly ethnic; some are in Detroit, some in Memphis, but they could be in Oakland, or Newark, anywhere overlooked in better economies and left to rot in the downturn. Most have people in them, oblivious to the camera while they go about their business, yet their presence doesn't mitigate the deserted quality of the settings. Facades crumble, and grass and weeds consume curbside yards. Windows are either boarded are darkened. The few people spotting the landscape seem to be loitering on abandoned property. Long stretches of flat roadside show businesses it's hard to imagine have opened their doors in the last decade--they share that quality with Edward Hopper's paintings, that even the evidence of life can't make it seem like anything is living in these streets and buildings. Yet people do live here, and their depiction is not by contrivance of the artist. It's the Street View feature from Google Maps. Rickard simply gathered and re-photographed the images for this exhibit. This raises the question of whether it is exploitative to curate images of people who seem unaware that their real lives and circumstances are about to make for such compelling viewing (the gallery website suggests that some of the people acknowledge the camera, but I did not see any examples of that). You have two more weeks to see it and decide for yourself.

Fan Ho's "A Hong Kong Memoir" is at Modernbook through Sept 3. Isa Leshko's "Thrills and Chills" continues at Cordon Potts through July 30. Both galleries are at 49 Geary.

For more events in San Francisco this week and beyond, check out our calendar section.