Andre Diaz, 51, has been photographing the small business owners of the Outer Sunset since 2012. He works on a 4x5 large-format camera he bought used in 1997. He gives every owner two prints. He keeps the negatives, organized by year, in archival boxes in his garage.
The project started, he says, because the laundromat on his block closed without warning. He had used it for eight years. He never knew the owner’s name.
“I felt like I had been a bad neighbor,” he says. “Then I thought, the city is full of people I should have known by name. So I started knocking on doors.”
The doors were every storefront on Judah from 19th Avenue to the beach, and every storefront on Noriega from 30th to 47th. The pitch was the same: I would like to take your portrait, on film, no charge, in your shop, in whatever you wear when you are working. I will give you the prints. The negatives stay with me.
Of the 412 portraits Andre has taken in the last 13 years, 67 of the businesses have closed. The portraits hang in the windows of some of the surviving shops. A few hang in the homes of the families of owners who have died.
In 2023, the daughter of a man who had owned a Vietnamese sandwich shop on Noriega for 31 years called Andre. Her father had died. He had not been photographed in 20 years before Andre took his portrait in 2017. The family did not have a recent picture for the funeral. They asked for the negative.
Andre delivered it to their door the next morning. He charged nothing. The family used the photograph at the service. The daughter still calls him every year on her father’s birthday to thank him.
There are 41 shops on Andre’s current list that have not yet been photographed. He is, he says, “behind schedule.” He plans to finish them this summer.
