If I were to take you to Cohen Alley, a seedy dead end in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, I doubt you’d call it a hotbed of creative thinking.
On any given night in 1991, it was common to encounter everything from pimps and prosititutes to crack dealers.
Everywhere you looked,there was scary stuff. If it wasnt the porn shops it was the wail of police sirens. It was a tough neighborhood.
It’s here that the Sixth Street Photography Workshop was created by Tom Ferentz.
It’s mission was to share the art and skills of photography with the homeless.
They were given nothing but the bare essentials. Film, paper, and of course, cameras along with access to the workshop’s darkroom and studio facilities.
The result was as brilliant as it was unexpected.
“Stories Of The City” was an exhibition unlike anything you could imagine.
It was powerful and deeply moving. The photographs told a poignant story of a life as alien to most of us as the surface of Mars.
You looked at this work and it was easy to think of critically acclaimed artists like Steve McCurry and Annie Leibovitz.
But then you realized that these incredible pictures were taken by homeless people.
Their cameras weren’t expensive. Neither was the lighting equipment. They worked in a borrowed darkroom. There were no paid assistants.
And yet the images were so engaging, so gripping in their ability to engage with us, it scarcely seemed possible. How could something so creative be accomplished with so little?
It’s easy to think that big ideas and big resources and synonymous. But it’s far from the truth.
As we saw with Chevy’s Fresh Mex campaign in this week’s Tuesday post, creative genius invariably comes, not from thinking outside the box, but from inside the box itself.
I’ve been told Strange Alchemy is one of the most creatively inspiring newsletters out there. That makes me deeply happy to know. It also makes me deeply grateful when a free subscriber upgrades to paid. I hope you’ll consider it. And thanks again.
I was unaware of this. Thanks for writing about it. I’m eager to check out the photographs.