"You are in this city that is so vibrant and full of everything, what are you doing to be a part of that?" Carson Lancaster asks in an interview with San Francisco Arts Quarterly in 2012. In fact, he'd just come up with an answer to that question: his Tenderloin art gallery, Book & Job, at Geary and Hyde.

Four years later, he's still going strong, and he's taken the opportunity to discuss his life and his work with Danish filmmaker Jonas Normann, whom a blog called the Phoblographer says has spent four years documenting local San Francisco area artists.


The Gallerist from jonasnormann on Vimeo.

Lancaster's commitment to the neighborhood is hard to doubt — "The Tenderloin is the greatest neighborhood in San Francisco," he says. "The most interesting, the most diverse, the most colorful, the loudest" — but the man talks an awful lot like the paranoid protagonist dude from Mr. Robot. That, along with some of the things he says, may lead you to wonder about his experience of the neighborhood — is, for example, its grittiness somehow just titillation or material for him? And, if so, is that problematic? In spite of that, or maybe because of it, this is an interesting, and short, film you should watch. It's very well shot, so definitely give it a once-over.

Previously: One Of These Light-Based Art Projects Will Hit The Tenderloin This Fall