We order a second pint. It occurs to me that, at any moment, any one of the punters might be walking in to a Troy Holden photograph. That’s the point; Troy’s been coming here for years. He asks the bartender about one of the regulars. He took a photo of the guy over the pool table months back and wants to give him a print.

The urge to share work as frantically as they make it is something peculiar to street shooters. I get the impression that Troy feels like his photography can, if shared, be of some service to the city, or at least to the communities in his photographs. This is his contribution. Troy grew up in Michigan but moved to San Francisco in 1996. At this point, he’s lived here longer than he ever did in the Great Lakes State.

His first neighborhood was mid-Market.

“It was crazy back then but it never felt unsafe,” he says. “There was opening drug dealing, public intoxication, peddling of stolen goods, but no violent crime. It was very live and let live, which is what I was always searching for.”