Troy Don Adams has been a student at the 6th on 7th Photography Workshop for 14 years. Adams says he does not have any favorite photographs in particular. He does not have any favorite photographers. He’s here for the process of actually making the photographs.
Sometimes it begins with one of the field trips organized by the workshop’s artistic director, S. Renée Jones, which take students to places like Mare Island. Sometimes it begins with walking into the workshop’s small gallery on Mission and Seventh streets in the South of Market, and asking Jones for a prompt. She keeps a deck of cards for just this purpose, with verbal prompts, like “juicy tomato” or “fresh strawberry.”
The prompt isn’t an assignment, just potential inspiration to help you figure out what you want to do next.
Adams also comes here for Jones, who is a steady, non-judgmental presence in an unsteady neighborhood. “In that darkroom, Renée helped pull me out of a lot of stupid stuff I was in. It got me out of myself,” Adams said. “She gave me something to express my creativity with, and it didn’t involve getting high.”
The work of slow observation that photography brings, Jones said, is “such a luxury.”
A six-month experiment that’s lasted over three decades
The workshop at 105 Seventh St. has quietly taught photography to low-income residents, veterans, and housing-insecure San Franciscans since 1991, when it was sponsored by Tenants and Owners Development Corporation (TODCO) to give residents of South of Market single-room occupancy hotels a creative outlet during building renovations.
The workshop was only intended to last a few months. This year, it is preparing to mark its 35th anniversary.
Jones discovered the place in 1994, after a spinal condition left her unable to work, and living out of her car. One day, as she wandered down Mission Street, she saw a flyer with directions to a free photography workshop. There, she met its founder, Tom Ferentz, who took her under his wing.
Jones had studied photography 20 years earlier, as a student at San Francisco State University. Twenty years before that, as one of 10 kids growing up in the Mission District, she played with discarded cameras brought home by her handyman father as a way to “hide and pay attention at the same time.”
The experience shaped how Jones understood the world, and made her question who is framed as beautiful and who is rendered invisible.
After Jones studied with Ferentz, she stayed on as a volunteer teacher, and moved into the Knox SRO in SoMa. In 2021, TODCO president John Elberling offered Jones the opportunity to help Ferentz run the photography workshop, allowing Jones to return to paid work after more than two decades.
But three weeks after she took the position, Ferentz was gone, taken quickly by cancer. She learned to run the workshop on the fly, writing her first grants while grieving her mentor.
Now Jones is the mentor. She’s always available by text or phone to work out ideas for photographs, said Adams. He credits her with teaching him new ways of looking at the world, and for making him feel accepted. “I am welcome there any time,” said Adams, of the workshop. “I haven’t experienced that in other places.”
A classroom, and an archive
Last Monday, on a rainy afternoon, Jones learned that one of her longtime students had passed away. She had just spoken with his sister, she said, her eyes glazed with tears, and apologized for her lack of composure.
“You just get so close to people that you end up like family,” she said.
Among that family: Robert “Nappy Chin” Farrell, known as the mayor of Sixth Street, who studied photography under Jones for 21 years, and who told her that when he felt tempted to buy drugs, he would buy a roll of film instead.
There was a man with short-term memory loss who had to rely on his long-term memory to express himself through photography. He would apologize each time he forgot a lesson, Jones recalled.
There was also the man who walked into the workshop carrying the only photograph he had of his late sister — her driver’s license — and asked if the studio could help him make a copy so he wouldn’t lose her image.
After the tech boom of the early 2000s displaced the original workshop from its spot on Sixth Street, the studio opened a darkroom at SOMArts. It now operates out of the ground floor of the Hotel Isabel, which is owned by TODCO.
Today, the photography is all digital — a shift driven not by trend but by access. Participants with limited vision or mobility found the manual cameras and darkroom process too much of a challenge.
Jones has also helped to adapt the workshop to the realities of housing instability. Many participants living in shelters and SROs lost their negatives. Jones began keeping careful archives of students’ film, and later, digital files decades ago, so that even if a person loses all of their belongings, their work will remain.
Jones said she’s had people come back over a decade later, and that they’ve been overjoyed to find their photographs preserved.
Jones’ own work is rooted in a style she calls “conscious photography” — images that reflect emotional or social realities. She works in black and white, and has captured street scenes and people across the city, including in its Black communities.
In 2010, Jones and Ferentz curated an exhibition called “Positively Sixth Street,” which captured the much-maligned Sixth Street corridor through the eyes of people who lived there. Now, as the workshop marks 35 years, Jones is curating an anniversary exhibition celebrating the city’s documentation by its students.
When people wander in to see the latest exhibits, said Jones, they often don’t realize that the other people hanging out in the workshop are the same people who took the photos. They don’t always fit peoples’ assumptions of who an artist can be.
Self-promotion is rare. Workshop members often don’t interact with the public, or even each other. “We keep to ourselves,” said Adams.
The workshop’s main draw for artists is not accolades, said Jones.
“We are something consistent in their life,” she said, “And we are always here.”
The opening reception for “Picture This! 5 years of Community Voice Through Photography” takes place Saturday, Feb. 21 from 12 to 4 p.m. at 105 Seventh St.