When Brenton Gieser and Felix Uribe set out to document San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, they didn’t want to simply take some pictures for the day and leave. Rather, they sought to create an entire storytelling project about the neighborhood, one that combines spoken interviews, portrait photography and journalism over the course of many months.
The result was Tender Souls, a “photo documentary project” that seeks to humanize the residents of the Tenderloin in an empathetic way that defies negative stereotypes about the neighborhood. Both Uribe and Gieser have deep roots in social work: Gieser is on the Legacy Committee at GLIDE, the beloved community church and provider of social services, and works as a creative consultant both for GLIDE and other organizations in the Tenderloin; Uribe was a long-term community volunteer at faith-based nonprofit City Impact, and is now Artist-in-Residence at City Hope.
The crux of Tender Souls is the residents’ stories in their own words. On the site, you can listen to an audio interview of each subject as a slideshow of portraits plays. For example, here are some of the photos from a day in the life of Mr. Holman, one of the subjects whom they interview and tail for a day:
Documentarians always run the risk of being seen as exploiting their subjects, yet Tender Souls avoids that by letting the residents speak for themselves. The photographs are candid and the interviews spare, the subjects speaking of their own volition and without a documentarian’s agenda. The end result is a genuine and poignant portrait of a neighborhood that is too often undeservedly spurned.
To hear more of Mr. Holman’s story and see more of the Tender Souls project, click here.
From top: first, second, third and fourth photo by Brenton Gieser; Photos of Mr. Holman by Felix Uribe.
