In Portraits of Tenderloin Residents, a Delicate Balance of Art and Hardship

On the corner of Jones and Ellis Streets in San Francisco, there’s an open-air art gallery filled with images of the very people who reside in the Tenderloin.

One block from Glide Memorial Church, right behind the sign that designates the area as Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, the images cover an entire building. The series of three-by-four-foot, black-and-white photos show residents from nearby SROs celebrating birthdays, customers patronizing local stores and folks who sleep on the streets, simply living.

The project is the work of photographer Harry Williams.

He introduced me to his work exactly a year ago, around the time he first mounted the images on the wall. Initially, I had questions:

Are you parachuting into this community? Are you making money off them? What does this do for folks living there? What about the larger societal issues we’re dealing with — how does this combat anything?

A year later, the images are still there. He’s had to repost a few, and some of the ones that remain have been weathered and tagged. Meanwhile, Williams’ work has gotten recognized on some prominent platforms, he’s given a talk at the Commonwealth Club, and he currently has work hanging inside of San Francisco City Hall as a part of the Metaphors of Recent Times exhibition.

Yet I’m still grappling with my quandaries, especially the one about art and the role it plays in the midst of all that’s going on.

To be clear, Williams hasn’t claimed to be “fighting the system” with his visual work. He’s also firmly against taking advantage of people. He insists that, as an artist, he’s simply focusing his lens on a group of people that society has turned its back on.

During presentations, like his upcoming talk on March 29 at an exhibition titled The Heart is Still Here, he often explains how this project came to be, after similar projects in other states and countries.

Outside of his day job as a visual designer (now freelance, formerly with Williams Sonoma), Williams has created a range of images from the hands of workers in Oaxaca, Mexico to a hill tribe group called the Black Hmong in the mountains of Northern Vietnam.

Another project, Lonesome Ash, focuses on people in the Buckeye state. “It was all these Vietnam vets,” says Williams about the photo project about battling gentrification in Columbus, Ohio. “The people that hung out in this bar were in a community that was being displaced.”

Williams, who’s lived in San Francisco for over two decades, is a Latino man who was raised in a majority-white area of rural Ohio. His coming-of-age experience allowed him to relate to people who’d been cast out of broader society, he says.

When he started working in the Tenderloin, Williams wasn’t planning on making it a two-year project. Then he met a guy named Shorty.

“He was celebrating, it was his birthday,” recalls Williams. “I said, ‘Oh, well, then you gotta let me take your picture.’ And that’s kind of how it all started.”

Williams has since taken thousands of shots in the neighborhood, mostly portraits. Sometimes he talks to people and leaves without photographing them, other times he takes photos, prints them and holds on to the prints until he runs into the person again.

“There’s people that I haven’t seen in like a year, and then I’ll run into them,” Williams tells me. “And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’ve had that whole time!?'”

Some people have broken into tears of joy, moved by the tangible image of themselves. Williams has also printed photos and held on to them for months, only to find that the person is no longer living. 

After accumulating enough photos, Williams got the idea to display them inside the liquor store-turned-family mart on the corner of Jones and Ellis. The store owner agreed to a small handful of photos, but “as soon as he saw them,” recalls Williams, “he loved them, and the people loved them.” He soon had permission to cover the whole building.

Unsure of how people were going to respond, Williams vowed that if anyone pictured requested it, he’d take them down.

Just after the images were mounted, it hit Williams. “Everybody that lives in the Tenderloin knows that it has this stereotype,” he says, referring to homelessness and drug use. A common sight is people driving past and taking photos of the conditions without getting out of their cars. 

Williams still remembers what one person he photographed once told him. “‘Now when people come by to take pictures,'” Williams recalls the man saying, “‘they’re going to take a picture of me on this wall and they’re going to be looking up at me, not looking down at me.'”

Once a visitor himself, Williams has become a part of the community. He’s even celebrated his birthday with folks near Jones and Ellis.

“I see a lot of people trying to help each other on the street,” he says. “So I feel like there’s still a lot of that humanity.”

And that’s the word I can’t argue with. Humanity.

I’ve long understood that the divisions in our society aren’t just about race, gender and religion, but about class, education and the widening economic division between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

In the face of legislation — local and federal — that allows for people on the lower end of the economic scale to be treated like second-class citizens, there’s an urgency for artists to take actions that create measurable change.

A number of multimedia projects focus on people living in the margins, and actionable steps to change their material lives. Street Spirit is an independent East Bay-based publication that not only shares stories of people facing housing instability, but employs them as well. (On Friday, March 28, they’ll celebrate 30 years of work.)

There’s also the Stolen Belonging Project, which tracked people’s personal items confiscated by the Department of Public Works. Closer to Williams’ work is Amos Gregory’s 2024 Tenderloin photo project, which specifically aimed to dispel stereotypes of the community’s Black residents.

Is lending an struggling person a bit of dignity really such a bad thing?

In talking to Williams about the role of art at a time like this, I’ve realized that the meaning of “a time like this” depends on your perspective. If you’ve been struggling for two or three decades, it doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. What matters is that there is someone who sees you as a human, who’s part of the larger community of humans.

For a photographer to sit on the curb and celebrate a birthday, or shed a tear over a memory, maybe that’s an important enough role for art at a time like this. It’s a tool, if used right, to make this world a little bit better.

Williams isn’t paid for this work, and funds his art supplies with his own money. He has a published book of photography, Eye See You, which he sells for $75. (He stresses that getting people to buy photos of other people is a hard sell.)

His work isn’t charity, but when he has loose change, he has no issue with sparing some dough for someone in need. At the same time, he says, “Just stopping and acknowledging somebody and talking to them is worth way more than a dollar.”

As much as people need money, housing and other tangible resources, Williams’ work is a reminder: Before we can change society, we have to change how we treat other people in society — especially those on the outskirts.