For the past five years, I’ve been shooting The Preakness in black and white. Yes, the hats and pageantry are all very colorful, but there’s also amazing light streaming through Old Hilltop, as Pimlico Race Course is known. This is my focus. The light and shadow, the light in the stables, the horses, the personalities. This project, titled, Hilltop, will hopefully be printed as a book in time for the 150th running of The Preakness Stakes in two years. Below is a gallery of shots from this past weekend’s Preakness 148—the latest installment of my ongoing project.

With mandated closures and practices of social distancing sweeping the state, Baltimoreans are forced to adapt to their new normal amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Here, we take a look at city spaces that were once full—congested Inner Harbor streets now silent, stocked grocery store shelves now barren, bustling restaurants now indefinitely shut down—as Charm City slows down to minimize the spread of COVID-19.

“Can I give you a heart?” Shelley Brown, a local wellbeing facilitator and speaker, asks the stream of patrons entering Lighthouse Liquors in Canton. While many decline, some brighten and carefully pluck a red enamel heart pin from her gloved palm.

“I don’t know what else to do for humanity,” she explains to passerbys. The pins are a symbol of mindfulness, as Brown encourages those who carry them to practice being present. “With everything that’s going on, our fear and our panic take us into the future of things that we actually have no control over. You can hold space for that emotion and notice it, but also remember you’re right here, right now.”

What is it about the night that intrigues us so? The darkness, the stillness, the glimpses of interior lives seen through illuminated windows: It all seems so pregnant with possibility compared to the flat brightness of day.

Baltimore photographer Patrick Joust excels at capturing the romance and danger of the Baltimore night with an unflinching gaze and elegant use of chiaroscuro reminiscent of painters like Edward Hopper. 

Like stills from a modern film noir, his shots hint at something ominous lurking just out of frame, as if the heavy calm is about to be broken, but by what is left up to the viewer’s imagination.

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Eyes on the sky, Mr. Tony watches for hawks as pigeons spill from the asphalt-shingled coop behind his Barclay Street row house. It’s feeding time, and, inevitably, a few of his 200 or so birds slip out in all the commotion.

“Sometimes, a hawk comes down and swipes one,” he says. Mr. Tony grabs a broom and shoos them toward the coop. He’s especially concerned because these “new kids on the block” are just months old. “Get back in there,” he says. “You don’t know nothin’ ’bout this world out here.” He follows the birds into the coop, closing a screen door behind him. Shelves of hay-filled nests line the walls, and Mr. Tony’s presence triggers rounds of cooing, punctuated by occasional peeps from the tiniest birds. He sweeps up and checks on certain birds. Grandpop, one of his oldest, looks good. So does Nighter, the 17-year-old father of Crazy White, who once escaped a hawk by flying through an open window that kept the larger bird at bay. Another bird shows some swelling on an injured leg that Mr. Tony treated with salt water and bandaged. He’ll keep an eye on that.

The 66-year-old Greenmount West resident—whose father named him Chopin, after the composer, and later nicknamed him Tony—has been keeping and flying birds for more than half a century. He got into it as a youngster, watching older guys catch pigeons by the railroad tracks near his home. It was common, at the time, to breed birds as a side-hustle and sell them as flyers or, to Mr. Tony’s chagrin, delicacies.

These days, Mr. Tony keeps three types of birds: tipplers (for covering long distances), homers (with their uncanny homing instinct), and rollers (which tumble and perform aerial tricks). He trains them to return to the coop by releasing groups of young and experienced birds—the young follow the old—and incrementally increasing the distance they travel. He’s taken them as far as the New Jersey Turnpike.

“These birds are my life,” says Mr. Tony, before ticking off a litany of personal ailments, including diabetes and asthma. “But I don’t let anything bother me, because I got to take care of them. When you’re a birdman, you’re a birdman.”