The demonstration at City Hall overflowed its expansive grass plaza. Protestors wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon Martin and carrying signs that read “I Can’t Breathe”—the last words of Eric Garner—stretched to the War Memorial Building. Some of the crowd, which had marched from Gilmor Homes, dispersed after the planned rally. Others headed to Camden Yards.

“That’s where all the police were stationed to make sure we didn’t mess up the game,” recalls Devin Allen, then just a year older than Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old from West Baltimore who had succumbed to injuries suffered in police custody six days earlier.

A self-taught, independent photographer still new to documenting protests, Allen had friends who, like Gray, lived in the sprawling Gilmor public-housing complex. He, too, had once been arrested and been given a so-called “rough ride,” and he knew one of young women screaming out in the viral video of Gray’s arrest.

As protestors pushed past the ballpark’s outdoor bars, both Orioles and visiting Red Sox fans began taunting them—laughing, and throwing food and drinks.

“It became this clash of Black protestors, 17, 18 years old, early 20s, and fans calling us the N-word and monkeys—stuff these young guys never  heard directed at them from white lips,” Allen says. “It was like the last drop in a bucket that overflows. Fights break out. Windows are smashed. The police cars blocking everyone in get stomped.”

To save space on the small 8-gigabyte memory cards he could afford, Allen picked his shots. At one point, he saw a young man with a red bandana covering his face throw something at a line of riot gear-clad police.

“I was about to take a picture right then, but let him run toward me instead,” Allen says. “I’m thinking in that moment, and I’m not thinking. It’s muscle memory. It’s instinct. I snap the picture. I look down at the image and now I’ve got to go—the police are charging, and I hop over this gate.”

He’d been documenting and uploading to social media all day and posted the image to Twitter and Instagram. While everything was still unfolding, he wrote, “We are sick & tired.”

He shot until the sun went down and woke up with more than 10,000 new followers. The BBC called the next morning to interview him about police brutality and the city’s protests. Allen had been covering all the events following Gray’s arrest and subsequent death for a week. However, he chose not to photograph Gray’s funeral two days after the confrontation at Camden Yards.

“I’d lost too many friends. To me, it would’ve been disrespectful.”

Nor did Allen shoot the destruction that followed. “Photographers, TV cameras were coming to Baltimore, with everyone focused on the CVS that was burning” at the busy intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, he says. “I knew people in that area, and in the Mondawmin community where things started when Frederick Douglass High students got out of school that day and the system shut down their buses. I lived, and still live, five minutes away. I needed to check on my friends. I tell people I mentor that being a good photographer is sometimes about the pictures you don’t take.”

That night, Allen went to work at the group home where he helped supervise individuals with developmental disabilities. The next morning, his phone blew up with calls from a blocked number, which turned out to be Time magazine.

His photo of the young guy in the red bandana would soon be on its the cover.

“I think people forget that the protests began before Freddie Gray passed,” says Allen, reflecting on one of the most momentous events in the city’s history after a recent discussion of Black voices in the media at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. He notes that the initial demonstrations were not that large. Mostly, they involved Gray’s family and friends, people from his Sandtown-Winchester community, and others from the People’s Power Assembly gathering in front of the Western District Police Station.

“The week he died, they started getting bigger and bigger,” Allen continues. “That whole of 2015 and into the summer of 2016 was a depressing period in a lot of ways, but activists, people in the community, we dubbed it the Baltimore Uprising. That wasn’t outsiders. That was us. It didn’t become ‘the riots.’ We in the city, we wanted to shape and own our narrative and not have others do that for us, or to us.”

In fact, what made Allen most proud of his Time cover was not the affirmation of his budding talent. He was only the third amateur photographer to ever land the then-92-year-old magazine’s front page. Nor was it the money. He admittedly knew nothing of copyrights and fee scales. What mattered was that his pictures, which were also featured inside the magazine, had not been reframed to fit some pre-existing reputation of his hometown. (See: The Wire.)

“I only wanted the work­—real imagery from real Baltimore, from the ground up—to get out into the world and it did.”

At the same time, as soon as the news broke on social media that an amateur West Baltimore photographer had snagged the cover of Time, professional documentary photographers and journalists started posting things like “you’ll never hear from him again” and “he’s going to disappear.” Some shared the sentiment to him face to face.

Instead, the magazine interviewed him and shared more of his photos for its LightBox blog. Allen followed that up with a Time photo essay called “The Heart of the City,” which put flesh on the Baltimore that he knew with intimate portraits from Gilmor Homes, Sandtown-Winchester, and Pennsylvania Avenue.

In July 2015, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum hosted his first solo exhibition. In August 2015, Under Armour hired him to shoot NBA star and brand ambassador Steph Curry on a trip to Asia—Allen’s first trip outside the U.S. Though he normally shoots in black-and-white, Allen switched to color for that campaign as opportunities and his photography continued to evolve. He visited Japan, China, and the Philippines, and Austria, as well, where he shot a Syrian refugee camp filled with families trying to get to Germany.

“I ONLY WANTED REAL IMAGERY FROM REAL BALTIMORE TO GET OUT INTO THE WORLD AND IT DID.”

By the end of the whirlwind year, his work had been featured in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, with additional exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Along the way, he also managed to launch a youth program, giving out free cameras and teaching photography to city kids with little connection to art. And when Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons learned of the GoFundMe page that Allen had put together to support the project, he wrote him a check for $20,000.

A singular Baltimore career was just getting started.

In 2017, Allen’s first hardcover book, A Beautiful Ghetto, with an introduction from his close friend, the Baltimore writer D. Watkins, was published and subsequently nominated for an NAACP Image Award. His third hardcover book, Devin Allen: Baltimore, supported through the Gordon Parks Foundation and a Steidl Book Prize grant, is due out this spring, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Uprising.

The collection is essentially an early retrospective of Allen’s career from Steidl, one of the most prestigious publishers of fine-art photobooks in the world. The book includes portraits, images of protests, and scenes of city street life from 2014 to 2023, including a few from Allen’s January show at Charles Street’s Galerie Myrtis, which represents him, and many never published before.

“There’s a trust and there’s a collaboration going on between Devin and his subjects,” says Peter Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation, which made Allen its inaugural fellow in 2017. A self-taught photographer whose career continues to inspire Allen, Parks is considered perhaps the greatest Black photographer of the 20th century. “That’s also why Gordon Parks was so successful, because he was able to capture moments that were quite personal and complicated, and he was able to make sure that his subjects trusted him, and it’s very clear that Devin has that same skill.”

One of the projects Allen is currently working on is a series around his maternal grandmother, Doris, who let him put his first camera on her Best Buy credit card. She was, coincidentally, his first introduction into photography. The family’s informal documentarian, his grandmother had been snapping photos on Christmas morning, at Easter, during July 4th cookouts, for his entire life, always keeping a camera in her vicinity. Allen’s mother, Gail, typically wrote the captions.

Now suffering from dementia, Doris attended every show and gallery talk when his career took off. Allen, who has been renovating her home, has since come across dozens of his grandmother’s pictures, including some from her Douglass High graduation and wedding. She kept everything, he learned, including magazine and newspaper clippings of all of his work, which he found in a large Ziploc bag.

Baltimore, Allen says, is a city that can be beautiful, big-hearted, and close-knit, i.e. “Smalltimore,” and he considers himself fortunate to grow up where and when he did, and certainly with the family he had. He rode bikes as a kid, took karate lessons to be like a Ninja Turtle, and played Little League baseball.

But it’s also a city that leaves scars, and he witnessed and experienced plenty of pain and trauma as a child growing up through Baltimore’s AIDS and crack epidemics.

“I was blessed where I had a good mom, a good grandmother, an active uncle, and I had aunts in my life,” says Allen, whose disarming smile and affable nature belie the seriousness and intentionality of his work. “But that’s not the same for a lot of my peers growing up.”

He mentions a friend who lost both parents to heroin overdoses. Another who had to raise his little brothers and sisters. He estimates he’s lost 20 friends to gun violence, adding he’s had friends who have killed other friends.

“Baltimore is one of those places where sometimes you grow up with a chip on your shoulder from going through so much pain and so many trials and tribulations,” he says. People will be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe a person did this and did that.’ But you don’t know what that person might have been through. That’s one of the things when you’re dealing with people like Freddie Gray [who suffered lead paint poisoning as a child] and others in the community. They got their own traumas, and during the Uprising, all that pain was released at one time.”

When he says that photography saved his life, he means it literally. Two years before the events of 2015, Allen lost his two of his closest friends to gun violence over the same weekend. One was shot seven times in front of a family member’s home. The other was killed outside of a store the next day. If Allen, who had hustled and sold drugs as a teenager and knew his way around the city’s street corners, hadn’t been shooting photographs that afternoon, he most likely would’ve been with him.

He had been shot at himself before, but after the birth of his daughter, recognized he needed to change. His mother helped him get him a job “pushing paper” at Transamerica. Not surprisingly, he found it boring, and when the life insurance company laid him off after three years, it proved a turning point.

A self-described “follower” in school, he first tried expressing himself through poetry (“I was terrible”) and spoken-word (“I hated performing”), but nonetheless found a supportive arts community in the Hollins Market district. When he later borrowed a buddy’s Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot, he realized he’d finally found his medium (“he had to ask for it back”).

Many of the friends he grew up with didn’t understand his passion for art and dismissed his efforts to become a photographer. They told him he was too old, the window for getting into an art institute or a school like Maryland Institute College of Art had closed. Not his grandmother, however.

“The name of her series is, She Saw Me Coming,” Allen says.

ALLEN’S WORK GOES AGAINST STEREOTYPES AND CELEBRATES THE DAY-TO-DAY BLACK EXPERIENCE, AND ITS TRADITIONS AND CULTURE.

D. Watkins, the Baltimore native and New York Times bestselling author of books like The Cook Up, The Beast Side, and Black Boy Smile, knew Allen before he became a photographer, when Allen and his crew were known for throwing popular parties on the city’s west side. He says one thing that people often forget is that Allen had begun garnering social media attention in Baltimore’s Black community for his photos and portraits before the Freddie Gray protests and Time cover.

“That photograph was not some lucky, random shot,” Watkins says. “A rank amateur could not have done that. He just wasn’t published.”

Allen had sent samples of his work to The Baltimore Sun and had never gotten as much as a reply. The former City Paper had at least sent a note back when they turned his work down.

“Devin will say, ‘My career was built on the broken back of Freddie Gray.’” Watkins says. “I challenge him on that. I don’t believe that.”

To Watkins, his longtime friend’s decade-long rise in the art world has been unique and sustained, because Allen, who admittedly considered moving to New York to further his career early on, remained committed to his community.

“He’s a success in the art world, but he’s not a guy from the art world, he’s a guy from the street,” Watkins says. “He moves like how we move outside. He talks to people, he asks questions, he doesn’t project any pretension. He doesn’t think he invented the camera—he loves the skill set and he loves what he’s able to do, but he respects people more.”

Watkins adds that when an artist, filmmaker, writer, or journalist is telling stories of places of struggle or people dealing with hardship, it is always a delicate matter. Many writers and artists don’t have any accountability to those people, and some get locked into the accolades or awards they want to win.

“I’ve been to galas with Devin where you look left and you see Usher, you look right and see Chelsea Clinton, you turn around and you bump into Gayle King,” he says. “That’s not who he is or why he does what he does. I’ve seen Devin at one of the New York events on Tuesday, and Thursday he’s back in Park Heights, at Gilmor Homes, over Whitelock, in those spaces shooting pictures or talking at a middle school.”

Myrtis Bedolla is the founder of Galerie Myrtis in Station North, which has represented Allen since 2022. The mission of her gallery supports the subjects and themes of his work, she says, providing a space and platform for its social, cultural, and political concerns. In turn, his work serves as a vehicle for discourse and discussions in the Black community.

She still remembers “the rawness” of Allen’s Time cover the first time she saw it. “I think we all felt the weight of what that image portrayed given Freddie Gray’s death,” says Bedolla. “But his photography was never solely about the Uprising and protest. Sometimes we need to look through his lens and voice for things, experiences, that are a bit more complicated.”

Allen’s work goes against stereotypes and celebrates the day-to-day Black experience, and its traditions and culture, she continues.

“Those stories and that imagery are also important,” says Bedolla. “It’s also important for Black children to see themselves portrayed in those positive images, too.”

To his credit, Allen has had the city’s youth in mind since he first had the opportunity to make an impact in their lives. Over the past decade, he’s given away more than 500 cameras and has visited more schools, taught more workshops, and mentored more students than can be counted. He says most people would be surprised by the number of kids who grow up in the inner city who have few photographs, unlike he did, simply of themselves and their families.

For his exhibition titled The Textures of Us at Galerie Myrtis earlier this year, Allen invited two of his mentees to participate with him, gladly yielding the stage to them during the show’s closing reception.

Photographer Joe Giordano, a Baltimore contributor and instructor at the Baltimore School for the Arts, says he’s taught several students who received their first camera from Allen. (Giordano, who shot the Uprising for the City Paper, shares an exhibition with Allen this month at the Creative Alliance.)

“Some kids are more comfortable with their phones,” Allen says. “So, when I give them a camera, it’s just like, all right, let me show you. But what I am trying to do is help them tell their story and own their truth.

“Everything that was happening in Baltimore 10 years ago, I was able to show the honest story. When I look back at some of the headlines or how they talked about Freddie Gray or how people were calling us thugs and these other things—through my imagery, you see it in a different light. It’s about speaking up for yourself. When I’m teaching, it’s more the history of photography, the importance of Black photographers and telling Black stories, and why we need to tell these stories. The technical stuff comes on the back end.”

“It’s funny,” Watkins says of Allen and his journey. “These kids, many people in the city, they know Devin because he has been in their neighborhood, to their school. And so, when he is on television, or they follow his Instagram and see good things happen for him or the awards he receives, they root for him.

“To me, that’s the part that is special. He’s not a politician, or a bigwig businessman, or even an NBA star, and I can name 10 of those from Baltimore. His story is powerful for people. He’s the guy from the trenches that picked up a camera and made it big.”

This year we celebrate our 50th Best of Baltimore issue—our biggest and boldest yet. Subscribe before 6/20 to guarantee your copy commemorating this milestone anniversary. 

At 6’3” and 240 pounds, wildlife photographer James Evans is often perceived as a threat, but it’s not the birds who are afraid. It’s the humans. And it’s not about his size, but rather his skin color.

“People don’t expect for brown and Black people to be in these spaces,” says Evans. He’s been called the N-word, watched suspiciously, and asked if his camera was a gun. “What you are really saying is, ‘You don’t belong here.’”

It’s something Evans has been dealing with his entire life—as the Black kid who liked and excelled at art. He grew up off Park Heights Avenue, just south of Northern Parkway, and the Baltimore School for the Arts changed his life.

“The school was like someone pulled back a curtain on the whole world, and I was hungry for it,” says Evans, who discovered photography there, falling in love with the freedom of the camera. “I didn’t have to clean up paints, I didn’t need a studio.” But he never felt like he had to choose photography over other art mediums. “I realized it was essentially all storytelling—you’re either sculpting a story, drawing a story, or photographing a story. But it’s all some form of narration.”

It’s that need for storytelling that prompted Evans, founder and CEO of Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity, a national nonprofit based in Baltimore, to self-publish Among the Birds, I Am Human, a book that mixes his bird photographs—hawks, ospreys, eagles, and barred owls, among many others—with his poetry, including a piece called “Why Are You Here?”

In most places—museums, stores, even his own neighborhood—Evans says, “he’s watched like a hawk.” It bothers him most when he’s out enjoying nature.

“It’s even more apparent when you’re simply outside and someone treats you as though you shouldn’t be there.”

Especially since the birds don’t care about skin color.

“Respectful and quiet I stare at you still,” writes Evans in his book. “Grateful your wisdom trust no man on this hill / Not moved by the Blackness that covers my build / It’s only my ‘humanity’ that sends fear down your quills / Among the Birds, I am Human / In this, I delight, here as a stranger in wonder of flight.”

He hopes that the book will help others recognize their biases—those who see him and hesitate or walk in a different direction.

“I want everybody to know that I belong,” says Evans. “I belong inside of a space that’s associated with beauty and nature because all of us do. I belong in those places just as much as anyone else.”

In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, where Maryland waters idly slip into Virginia, time stands still on the remote archipelago of Tangier Island. An hour’s ferry ride from the mainland, there are no cars, no hospital, two churches, one schoolhouse, and limited cell phone service, where voices still lilt with the hint of an English brogue.

It’s a place so small—shrinking more and more each year in part to climate change—you can almost see across it, and when visitors arrive, some can’t help but feel a sense of voyeurism, having ventured out so far to set eyes on this bygone way of life, which might actually disappear in the next half century.

Not Jay Fleming, though. Wearing a pastel sun shirt, Under Armour sneakers, and polarized sunglasses, he whips up to the Tangier pier on a borrowed golf cart and shoots the breeze with a pair of locals picking leftover crabs on their lunch break. The 34-year-old Annapolis photographer with some 10,000 book sales and 18,000 Instagram followers is somehow not an outsider here.

“He calls me ‘shithead,’” says Fleming with a boyish grin, nodding to an old timer at the oil shop before peeling off to grab his gear and head north to nearby Smith Island. His boat—a sleek gray Privateer with a 200-horsepower Suzuki motor—is meant to cut through the capricious waters of this widest part of the Chesapeake, and coming here for more than a decade, he now knows the channels, shallows, and tides, plus the best spots for finding arrowheads and foraging wild asparagus. After weeks between the islands, though, he’s now eager to get home, having just wrapped a string of six workshops and the final photographs for his upcoming book, Island Life.

“I haven’t driven a car in a month,” says Fleming, his skin tan and dark curls tangled as he steers into the wind toward the Maryland line. “Smith Islanders call this my peeler run”—comparing his recent work hustle to the waterman’s shoulder season of soft-crab harvests—“I’ve made some real friends here.”

This place, these people, the water. It is all peak Jay Fleming. A rightful heir in the lineage of iconic Chesapeake Bay photographers—A. Aubrey Bodine, Marion E. Warren, Robert de Gast, David Harp—he has spent the past decade gaining a loyal following for his visual storytelling that offers windows into the nation’s largest estuary that even many lifelong residents have never seen: underwater terrapins, newborn egrets, shedding blue crabs. Moonlit lighthouses, Bay Bridge sunrises, a haunting series on the last house of Holland Island. Now, as his time on Smith and Tangier shows, his bread-and-butter is the people of the Chesapeake.

“I’m not reinventing the wheel, people have done what I’ve done before,” says Fleming. “But rather than carry a torch, I’m trying to find a way to make my own work stand out.”

His work—low to the water, soft light, vibrant colors, strong reflections—has become almost instantly recognizable, and in part that is because of his commitment to capturing the image by any means necessary—on land, underwater, by kayak, in airplanes, through storms, before sunrise, even neck-deep in pound nets full of menhaden.

This aquatic comfort zone makes sense once you learn about Fleming’s upbringing. Growing up between Annapolis and Lewes, Delaware, he has been a lifelong river rat, swimming and fishing and boating as far back as he can remember, with his own kayak at the age of 15 scratching a growing itch to explore the water further. On evenings and weekends, he’d head out with rolls of film and a hand-me-down Nikon from his father, Kevin, an award-winning photographer for National Geographic, who also had an affinity for the great outdoors.

“. . . RATHER THAN CARRY A TORCH, I’M TRYING TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE MY OWN WORK STAND OUT.”

Equal credit goes to his mother, Carla, a director for the Department of Natural Resources, where Fleming interned in high school. After graduating with an economics degree from St. Mary’s College—“I was going to be a biology major but almost failed my first semester”—and a stint with the National Park Service at Yellowstone where he ran a gillnetting boat to catch invasive lake trout, he landed back at the DNR in seafood marketing. Here, he helped launch the “True Blue” program to promote local sourcing and got inspired with the idea for his first book.

“And the rest is recent history,” he says, now shooting on a digital Nikon D850.

But for three years, Fleming shadowed watermen and captured hundreds of thousands of photographs to create Working the Water, a photojournalistic narrative of the people—from watermen to crab pickers to boat builders—who make their livelihoods on the Chesapeake. Since its self-publication in 2016, it has become a coffee table staple around the watershed, initially selling out in its first 40 days and now in its fourth printing.

Those watermen, in particular, have become a niche for Fleming, and their notoriously cautious communities have largely welcomed him with open arms. He has been invited to birthday parties and church services, taken the local preacher out snorkeling, and often eats seafood with the family of Mary Ada Marshall, his sort of unofficial godmother and the high priestess of Smith Island cakes, whom he also hires to teach his workshop students—mostly amateur photographers—how to make the classic dessert. Many wear the honor of being featured in a Jay Fleming photograph like a badge, with his images framed in households, displayed at funerals, and used at farmers market stands to help sell their fresh-caught fish.

“Catchin’ red drum out here!” calls out local crabber Allen Marsh, looking up from his docked workboat on Smith Island’s tiny hamlet of Ewell as Fleming ambles in alongside him just before sunset.

“Any big ones?” asks Fleming, who has grabbed his own fishing rod in hopes of an evening catch.

“About 10 pounds,” says Marsh, before turning back to the work at hand.

The next morning, Fleming will shadow Marsh’s soft crab harvest, as he has many times before, seamlessly maneuvering around the long iron chain of the scraping dredge with barely a ripple, just another fish in the water as he sets his boat in neutral and slides between the bow and stern to get his shots.

“When Jay shows up, there’s low tides and no crabs,” cracks Marsh as he sifts through his haul for market-size soft-shells, finding a few keepers.

“People have this preconceived notion that watermen are tough to get along with, and I don’t think that’s the case—as long as you don’t demonize what they do,” says Fleming. “I don’t have a political agenda or an environmental agenda. I just show things as I see them. I hope my work can be an educational tool and help people make their own opinions.”

Of course, given his public following and proximity to the water, it would be easy for Fleming to become a voice for either of these Chesapeake stakeholders—the watermen or the environmentalists—particularly as the two parties continue to quarrel over the management of the bay’s natural resources, and while the estuary’s overall health continues to ail, receiving a “C” on its latest annual report card by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“The bay is in trouble and humans are the cause of it,” says Fleming, “but I’m just a fly on the wall.”

Still, it was these undeniable changes that brought him down to the islands in the first place, drawn by a Facebook post featuring pictures of old headstones washing away on the now-abandoned Tangier “Uppards.” He arrived with his kayak via the mainland mailboat, paddled north to this spit of marsh, and camped out overnight to capture the drowning cemetery at low tide.

“I DON’T HAVE A POLITICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA. I JUST SHOW THINGS AS I SEE THEM.”

“Maybe I have a knack for photographing things that are on the edge,” says Fleming, pointing to the images in Island Life, a visual narrative over a decade in the making of these last two inhabited off-shore islands. “I hate to say it, but these photographs will be historical in 50 years. An inventory of what’s here now.”

Which is in part what keeps him out here, on the water—this idea of documenting the way things were. At some point, he would like to create a series on issues the Chesapeake faces, such as pollution: “You’d be amazed at how many balloons you find out here,” he says. Or invasive species: “Blue catfish are a big threat to the ecology of the bay.”

For now, he’s all packed up and headed back to his car in Crisfield—his boat’s hull full of backpacks, camera cases, and a single, safely secured Smith Island cake—navigating the swells of northeast wind gusts, soaking wet by the time he reaches shore. This weekend, he’ll make his way down to Chincoteague, Virginia, for two more workshops, then get to work on final proofs for his new book.

“Every day is different,” says Fleming. “It’s definitely better than sitting behind a desk.”

Back in his office in Stevensville, a salon wall of framed photographs showcases his own work, plus magazine covers, pictures with Governor Hogan and Senator Van Hollen, and a candid shot alongside Art Daniels, the late Deal Island skipjack captain and first waterman to take Fleming under his wing.

Shelves of vintage cameras and oyster cans mingle with boxes of his dad’s old slides, while a massive Epson printer inches out images to be framed and hung in homes, offices, and restaurants like the True Chesapeake Oyster Co. in Baltimore.

Island Life will hit stores in October, but on this July afternoon, red pen marks dot a draft of its 280 pages, with Fleming having spent the weeks after his return from the islands sifting through images, writing captions, and taking the occasional nap. Come fall, he’ll host book signings and museum exhibitions, with most of the word spread through social media, where, even in a sea of images, his followers only continue to grow.

“Facebook and Instagram have been such incredible tools to reach people,” says Fleming. “I can run my social media from my boat.”

He relishes that freedom, the ability to be his own boss and dictate his own schedule—following the weather or harvests or next whim of inspiration, which doesn’t seem to be drying up anytime soon. This month, he’ll visit Maine to shadow lobstermen for his next book on the fisheries of the Atlantic Coast. But these local waters will still always be home.

“There are so many ways to tell a story here,” says Fleming. “I’ve been able to see so many things I wouldn’t have otherwise, and it’s given me a better understanding of the Chesapeake Bay. But anybody could do what I do, really. You just have to go out there and see it.”

Using Ilford photo paper and film, Baltimore School for the Arts seniors Aleeia Townes, Andrew Selway, Kandice Johnson, Dionna Richardson, Myah Stokes, Sydney Adams, Zoe Jackson, and Freddy Wolfe printed the following works in the school’s darkroom just before the COVID-19 lockdown and cancellation of school for the year.

They’ve spent the last two months of their senior year at home, wrapping up the remainder of their classwork and capturing their final photography projects digitally.

“It’s been a lot slower,” says Wolfe. “The lack of people makes for some very isolated work. I’ve been appreciating nature and being outside much more.”

With the uncertainty surrounding when school structure will eventually resume as normal, Wolfe and his classmates might be the last film students to work hands-on in a darkroom setting for many months ahead.

We hope that this isn’t the case, for their sake and the sake of photography’s future.

The students’ senior showcase was set to take place at the Luann Carra Gallery in Fells Point. In the wake of its cancellation, we’ve compiled a digital gallery of the last images they printed in the darkroom in February and March.

Aleeia Townes

Andrew Selway

Kandice Johnson

Dionna Richardson

Myah Stokes

Sydney Adams

Zoe Jackson

Freddy Wolfe

James Trudeau has gotten used to a nightly routine of changing his clothes immediately when he arrives home to his family from work. As a phlebotomist and research technician working as a data collector on a COVID-19 study at the Johns Hopkins University, his daily uniform requires a respirator, tear-off gown, multiple pairs of gloves, and many applications of hand sanitizer in between the layers.

“All of these precautions are necessary just to step into a patient’s room,” Trudeau said in an email. “A patient who may be a mother, father, grandparent, or someone’s child. These patients are just like you and me, except they tested positive for COVID-19.”

In between being a researcher, husband, and father, Trudeau, also a local photographer, has found time to document the pandemic through the lens of his Nikon D800.

In an effort to capture the emotional disconnect the city is feeling along with the rest of the world right now, Trudeau hit the streets to shoot everything from a deserted Pennsylvania Station to the famous marquee outside Bengies Drive-In Theater in Middle River, which currently advises patrons to avoid crowds and wash their hands.

On the corner of East Monument Street and North Patterson Park Avenue, Trudeau photographed a man named Rudy sitting in his wheelchair wearing a mask. When asked how the pandemic has impacted his everyday life, Rudy, who has been out of work for the last 20 years, said he now has time to simply sit and reflect. “I’m tired of watching the same thing on TV,” he said. “I can’t watch sports or do anything but wait for this to end.”

Until then, Baltimoreans continue to adapt to the new reality of maintaining social distance, wearing protective gear, and, of course, spreading messages of positivity and hope while looking out for their neighbors.

“This new normal is a shock, especially when I initially downplayed the gravity of the virus in my own head, as I am sure others may have,” Trudeau says. “Each day I am worried that I will bring home the virus, endangering my family, but I am heartened by the efforts being made at Hopkins and around the world to help keep everyone safe and bring this pandemic to an end.”

Under normal circumstances, freelance work, slower in the winter, picks up each spring, says Baltimore contributing photographer Sean Scheidt. This was how he found himself at Patapsco State Park in March.

“I was going stir crazy,” says Scheidt, who shot the following images. “My gym was closed. People told me to work on design projects, but I’m not a graphic designer. I needed to get out of the house and go for a hike.”

The restlessness is genetic. His grandmother has been a Dundalk crossing guard for 52 years, and it was all he could do to keep her inside while he made the grocery runs during the coronavirus outbreak.

In his neighborhood, Scheidt took pictures of church signs explaining services were canceled, a shuttered senior center, empty stores, and highway signs warning against large gatherings.

“At Patapsco, the first thing I saw was the closed playground,” he recalls. “It was eerie. Disconcerting. It’s a place for kids covered with police crime tape. I did a six-mile trail and put one foot in front of the other. It took my mind off things. I took the photograph when I got back.”

Monica Bland isn’t sure what made her veer from her usual route. She was picking up her godchildren one afternoon last year when she mistakenly took a different turn and suddenly found herself staring up at a two-story image of a family of nine shopping for Easter shoes. It was a mural recreated from a 1956 photograph in the Afro-American newspaper. “And I realized, as the faces in the mural are looking back at me, that I know this family,” recounts Bland, who runs a small local business. “It’s my grandparents, all my aunts, my uncle, and my mother.”

Michael Owen, of Baltimore Love Project renown, painted the larger-than-life black and white image as it appeared in print on Holy Saturday (the original photograph graces the cover of our February issue). It’s not quite photorealism. But it’s close enough given the rough-concrete sidewall of the Midtown rowhouse where the work towers over an otherwise empty lot.

In fact, the mural is a collaboration between Owen and photographer Webster Phillips, whose grandfather, Henry Phillips, shot the picture for the Afro-American. The plaque next to the mural implored viewers to reach out to the younger Phillips if they could ID the people featured: “Help us save Baltimore history.” Startled, and moved, Bland called.

“I was blown away,” Phillips says. “You hope you get a call like that. You don’t really expect it.”

The Dean family buying Easter shoes. From left, Walter, Ruth, Annette, Patricia, Ransom, Delores, Sonia, Gloria, and Janice.

Phillips has spent the past several years digitizing his grandfather’s work—some 10,000 images to date, mostly shot between 1945-1965—organizing gallery shows, posting photographs across social media, and now venturing to senior centers in hopes of identifying more folks in the photos.

Fortunately, the elder Phillips, who died in 1993, stored all his negatives, allowing for the creation of new, authentic hi-resolution reproductions. (There’s actually three generations of Phillips photographers. Henry Phillips’ son and Webster Phillips’ father, Irving Phillips, became The Sun’s first black photographer.) There was simply no one else documenting mid-century Black Baltimore life like Henry Phillips did at a time when new flash and film technology enabled photographers to ditch their tripods, become mobile, and capture moments as they happened.

To date, the cache includes photos of Louis Armstrong blowing his horn backstage at the Royal Theatre, Billie Holiday shopping on Pennsylvania Avenue, Ella Fitzgerald playing ping pong in a fur coat, Duke Ellington performing in Baltimore, Joe Louis boxing and golfing in Baltimore, Jackie Robinson at spring training, and a singularly poignant photo of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy comforting Coretta Scott King in a private moment at her husband’s funeral in 1968.

Equally compelling, significant, and gorgeous are the portraits that Henry Phillips took of everyday Baltimoreans—a child eating cotton candy, students roller-skating at recess, the first black graduate in a sea of white faces and white uniforms at the Naval Academy, women on their way to church in their Sunday best, and Afro-American cartoonist Thomas Stockett at his drafting table.

“I thought Henry Phillips was a very quiet, understated man on a mission,” Leslie King-Hammond, founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, once said. “He told the other side of the story. That, in spite of the hardships of being an African American in this country, we still made a life of substance and meaning, and dignity and elegance.”

I. Henry Phillips Sr. in the Afro-American newspapers dark room with son Frank Phillips.

Webster Phillips says, for him, the best thing about working with his grandfather’s collection isn’t actually the photographs themselves, but the feeling of walking in his grandfather’s shoes.

“He took pictures everywhere he went,” Phillips says. “He’d come home from work, stop, and take a portrait of someone he met outside a corner store, develop it, and give to him. And then, I’m also with him at the 1963 March on Washington. I’ve looked at more than 10,000 of his photographs. Think about it. It’s like going through your grandfather’s Instagram or Facebook. Wouldn’t you like to do that?”

A decade and a half ago, photographer Ben Marcin hiked—not
hitchhiked—from Baltimore to Philadelphia, traversing as many remote
farms and wooded areas as possible along the way. He estimates he’s
completed more than 5,600 hikes, two each weekend, one mid-week, give or
take, for the past 40 years, mostly in the counties surrounding
Baltimore. But his meanderings also include far-flung places like
Guatemala’s Mayan highlands, rural Mexico, India, and Montenegro. His
first pilgrimage, at four years old, began at the kitchen door of his
family’s house in the small German town where he was born. “I crossed
over the railroad tracks, cut through a cornfield, went through some
woods, and walked into town where I asked a traffic cop at an
intersection to get my Dad,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was out of gas
and wasn’t sure how to get home.”

Since earning an economics
degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he’s held down
a job at the Social Security Administration for the past three decades,
but he’s always had this other side, the solo expeditioner part, that
is also linked to an artistic impulse.

He tried watercolor
painting initially—“Looks easy but it’s not,” he says—and didn’t buy his
first camera until he was 27. Like many people, the first photos he
took tended to be travel pictures from exotic destinations. Later,
self-taught, he began playing with color and infrared images and
eventually had three shows at Hampden’s Gomez Gallery, which closed in
2003.

He’s now 55, and although his hair has grayed, he remains as
fit, restless, and curious as ever. Over the years, however, his
photography has turned closer to home, more inward, “to stories,” as he
puts it. Begun in 2010, his series,
Last House Standing—large-scale
portraits of literally the last row house standing on different city
blocks, often no more than two miles from his own Bolton Hill row
home—is garnering the first international attention of his career, with
reviews from the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, and China, not to
mention cultural observers like
The Paris Review, Slate, and Wired.
The stark, unsentimental photos manage to reveal both the decay and
ghostly beauty of some of Baltimore’s iconic row houses and their fading
environs.

“Monuments,” Marcin calls the withered, three-story, last turn-of-the-century row houses, “to dead neighborhoods.”

“The
irony isn’t lost on me,” he adds. “All the traveling I’ve done, and, in
the end, what I find most compelling has been right here all along.”

In many ways, Marcin’s Last House Standing
photographs are more remarkable for what they leave out than for what
they show. There are no cars out in front of the homes in the barren
streets and, except for the odd air-conditioning unit or bed sheet in an
upstairs window, few signs of life, if any, can be seen in the
pictures. Some of the homes clearly appear to be vacant, boarded up at
least, but not all.

There are no leaves on the trees nearby, no
clouds or sunshine in the backdrop, just overcast, dull skies in nearly
every photograph. There is rarely even a street sign or lamppost in the
frame, and there are no people. But the most obvious things missing are
the neighboring homes—leaving the jarring juxtaposition of a house that
is 15 feet wide and 40 feet tall standing by itself in an empty lot. “No
engineer or architect would design a structure like that,” says Marcin,
who moved to the U.S. when he was 10. “They were meant to be attached
to something else.”

Inevitably, viewers begin to consider the ages
of these homes and the lives of those who once inhabited these odd,
solitary structures, suddenly alone in the middle of once-thriving
residential blocks. “A hundred people, generations of families, likely
lived in these houses over the course of their lives, especially as they
were divided into apartments,” says Marcin, staring at a towering
Mosher Street row house with an outline of brick remnants from its
former next-door neighbor still affixed to an exterior wall. Outside
another, similar but still-inhabited home, a different question arises
for Marcin during a recent shooting trip: “What is it about the person
who still lives here, the last person on their block, that made them
defiant enough to stay when everyone else left?”

Austere and self-possessed, the pictures are also sobering images of urban disintegration.

“Certainly,
the photographs are social and political statements, particularly for
what has and is happening in Baltimore,” says Constantine Grimaldis, who
in 1977 opened the prominent North Charles Street gallery which bears
his name and hosted a
Last House Standing exhibition earlier
this year. “They are also very good photographs, very good art, and the
composition goes to that. He’s interested in all of that [the fine art
aspects], but he’s also intensely interested in life, and that comes
through in his work.”

Grimaldis adds that photos like Marcin’s may
look deceptively simple at a glance, “but like all art,” he says, “it
doesn’t just happen in front of you.

“It takes time to do the work
and, at the same time, derive the meaning from it during the process,”
Grimaldis says. “In Ben’s case, it also took time to find these places.”

Marcin,
not surprisingly, stumbled across his first “last house standing” in
2010, during a lunchtime bike trek from Social Security Administration
headquarters in Woodlawn back into the city. As always, compelled to
explore the unfamiliar, he found himself in some of the struggling
neighborhoods of West Baltimore. (While acknowledging the need to take
safety precautions during his shooting trips, he jokes that he’s more
afraid that his wife, Lynn, whom he met when she was the curator at the
Gomez Gallery, will at some point organize an intervention and put a
stop to his wanderings. He’s never had any problems during his current
project, but over the years has had warning shots fired over his head by
farmers and was once robbed in Mexico by a police officer.)

“You can ride through Sandtown-Winchester, Poppleton, Harlem Park, for miles, and so much of it is desolate,” he says, noting the city’s estimated 16,000 vacant houses and plans to demolish dozens of “last houses standing” via eminent domain over the next few years. “Boarded-up block after boarded-up block—and you see very few people.

“The first house that stopped me in my tracks,” he continues, “was three stories, painted light blue, boarded windows painted white for some reason. It looked like a face staring at me with six eyes.” Marcin says he knew the house would make a great photo by itself, but then came across another three-story row house standing alone farther down the same street. That was the beginning.

First and foremost, Marcin’s concentration has been centered on “taking good pictures.” He settled on creating a typology—a series—that highlighted the unique architecture and haunting grace of the brick buildings. “These homes were meant to last hundreds of years,” he says. “They have these ornate cornices, but now also years of wear and tear and peeling paint. It’s as if their skin is old and wrinkled, but if you look, you can still see the youthful beauty that was there at one time.”

And although he views his work through a personal, storytelling lens—“I’m not a political activist, I don’t go to meetings”—he’s fully aware that his photographs also evoke themes of urban poverty, decay, and dislocation. The context, distance, and objectivity of the pictures create space for interpretation on different levels, opening discussions about population loss and blight, inevitable among the first reactions for Baltimoreans who recognize their city in the pictures.

“We live in times where we all see what’s happening all over the world, traveling through the Internet, experiencing everything that’s uploaded on YouTube,” says Doreen Bolger, director of The Baltimore Museum of Art, who describes herself as a fan of Marcin’s work, including a previous series on homeless encampments. “At the same time we have this global perspective, there is something very powerful about the local. It’s so important to understand the richness and the history of the different places in the city in which we live.”

As his Last House Standing project continues, it’s evolving. Some of the first houses Marcin photographed have subsequently been knocked down, and he’s returning to those blocks, documenting the erasure of the last row house on the street, preparing to create before-and-after diptychs.

“What I’ve been interested in all along is not ‘ruin porn,’” Marcin says, referring to a term sometimes used to describe overtly exploitative photography from Rust Belt locales such as Detroit, MI, or Braddock, PA, outside Pittsburgh, “but capturing the memories and transition these houses represent. In that sense, taking a picture of what it looks like after it’s gone is a pretty obvious thing to do next.”

In 1891, Harry T. Pratt became the first African-American student granted admission to attend Maryland Institute College of Art. More than 100 years later, MICA still struggles to equitably reflect the demographics of Baltimore City. Blackives, an exhibition and online database curated by senior photography student Deyane Moses archives the portraits and oral histories of black MICA students and alumni.

When Moses’ review of the school’s nearly 300-page autobiography yielded only one page of information about non-white students, Moses decided to create her own archival project. Armed with her camera and a desire to erect a new monument for underrepresented populations, Moses ventured to photograph every black student she saw on campus. Those random and serendipitous encounters rendered a portfolio of beautifully earnest portraits, candid moments that document students who often feel invisible. The gesture offers a vulnerable bridge to connect with others who may feel a kindred kind of isolation. To be a person of color attending a predominately white institution of higher education can be a solitary experience.

Blackives is a living history developed to affirm black students and instigate shifts in MICA’s established diversity and inclusion policies and practices. The popularity of the exhibition triggered a lengthy response from the school’s president, Samuel Hoi. In the memo, President Hoi acknowledged the segregationist history at MICA and vowed to “strive forward to fulfill its diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization (DEIG) goals.” As a result, the exhibition was extended through March and reinstalled in the atrium of the school’s Main Building.

Shortly before the opening of Blackives, Moses and other black MICA students staged an intervention to memorialize Robert H. Clark, one of the first African-American students denied admittance because of his race. The intervention, Take Back the Steps, successfully blocked the entrance to the building for 63 minutes, one minute for every year black students were denied enrollment to attend. At the event, Moses issued a statement that contextualized a history of omission that few in the MICA community knew about.

We spoke with Moses and Clyde Johnson, associate dean at the Center for Identity & Inclusion about the exhibition, the community’s response, and their hopes for increased diversity on campus.

Blackives is an exhibition, but it is also an online database?

Deyane Moses: Yes. Maryland Institute Black Archives is the database which houses all the articles I found online, but I’m also collecting oral histories from the students who are currently here. The articles that I found from back in the day, the ways that they described black people, our voices were lost. The Afro supplemented for some of those voices, but they were around in the 1890s. So it was important to retrieve those voices now and to also speak to alumni and faculty. That’s how the project is moving forward, by looking at the past present and moving forward into the future. Many students at MICA don’t feel like they have support and mentorship.

What has the response been from black students and alumni about their experiences at MICA?

DM: They feel like they are not supported, especially when it comes to critiques. Classes are not that diverse. A lot of times I am the only black student in my photography classes. For the first time in my senior year, there are three other senior photography students in the same class with me. We talked about that. I also went to the black student union and talked to them about the low retention rate of black students at MICA. The show has been well received and everyone wants MICA to do more for black students and to support them.

Why now is the school and President Hoi speaking up about this issue and how will it effect the school’s approach to increase the diversity of its faculty and student body?

Clyde Johnson: We have just ended a nearly three-year president’s task force on diversity, equity, inclusion, and globalization. It entailed auditors looking over policies and programs regarding students of color, our LGBTQIA communities, and every aspect of diversity. We just did that and we’ve created a hopefully powerful document that should now be in implementation phase. These are new policies, new hiring guidelines. We have heard students say that the school does not have enough faculty members of color. So we have hired trainers to learn about implicit bias in the hiring process. I think we are working in tandem with this conversation. What Deyanne’s exhibition has done is reminded us that the work we are doing is urgent. Here’s the history, let’s do the work.

I love that the exhibition looks like a living room and the wall of student portraits feel like members of your family.

DM: The majority of the portraits are of undergrad and graduates and my mentor, Colette Veasey-Cullors. They are my family. Everyone was really supportive. If they had a second, they let me take their portrait. I just asked that they focus and look at me so that, when others saw the wall, there would be a strong presence—they would know that we are here. The wallpaper is inspired by the 1890s, when the first black graduate, Harry T. Pratt, started. I wanted the feeling of home but also an awareness that you were in a museum.

You received some criticism from some students and staff about covering the statues in the Main Building with black curtains.

DM: I love this building, but I always noticed the white sculptures. Black people are not in those histories. I asked that they be covered, out of respect for black history as important by itself, outside of those histories. Some people are really upset about it.

What are your hopes for the exhibition?

DM: I would like it to be a permanent fixture somewhere in MICA and for the database to continue. I hope this is the beginning of other colleges admitting their histories so they can make change there, as well.

We all know that social media has changed the way we digest food, with everyone and their grandmother using Instagram to flaunt their stylish meals out. Some people have even become quasi-celebrities, or “influencers,” over the food-porn pics they post. Personally, we’re sort of over all the avocado toast glamour shots. The new trend we’re falling for is the use of this platform by local food makers to share their own drool-worthy goods and garner a loyal following. Ranging from home cooks to epicurean artists, here are four of our favorites that are worth a follow. A few swipes down their feed and you’ll be turning into Pavlov’s dog in no time.

Bramble Baking Co.

Sweet dreams are made of this small-batch pie, cake, and cookie company run by local baker Allie Smith. Using artisanal ingredients and unique flavors, these desserts will inspire you to spend your weekends knuckles deep in dough. “If even a few people feel motivated to work with their hands, that’s exciting for me,” says Smith. Try her sweets at the Prime Corner bodega in Hampden.

In Absence Of

of Food goes high-fashion in this new “comestible design studio” by Krystal Mack, founder of culinary startups such as The PieCycle and BLK//SUGAR. She’ll soon be using the space, located in her own home and documented on her Instagram, to host #FauteDeMieuxAM, a salon-style breakfast and art experience. “Food can be a vehicle for so much more than flavors and nutrients,” says Mack. “Food is art, and like most art, it can tell a story.”

Loaf Bakehouse

While scrolling this roving micro-baker’s Instagram account, we find ourselves thinking, “Give us this day our daily bread!,” as the staple gets the star treatment. Never before has sustenance looked this good, with stunning portraits of artisanal flours, hand-kneaded doughs, and old-world loaves that showcase the true art of baking. Find these sourdoughs IRL on Saturdays at the 32nd Street Farmers’ Market.

Brown Bread

Is there any carb more bodacious than scratch-made biscuits? (We think not!) This local baker takes the Southern comfort to a new level with inventive riffs on savory and sweet. Whatever the flavor, these are flaky, buttery “biscuits worthy of a happy dance,” according to owner Jess Obayan, who bakes them in her Baltimore rowhome and serves them at pop-ups mentioned on her Instagram.

The minute I enter the studio tucked away on a secluded road near Govans for my first-ever boudoir shoot, I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake. With lingerie that I purchased from a cheap overseas website and my fiancé’s black and red football jersey in hand, I contemplate running back to my car, but it’s too late, as boudoir photographer Candice Kemp has seen me. In fact, she’ll soon be seeing much more of me.

“Come on in,” coaxes Kemp of Candice Michelle Boudoir. “Relax, we’re going to have a good time.” Of course, she won’t be the one who will soon be nearly nude in front of a camera. I try to convince myself that my fiancé will love these photos of me as a wedding gift, but I’m definitely having second thoughts. This whole photoshoot was my best friend’s suggestion, and I had somehow agreed it was a good idea. I’ve always considered myself a bit of an exhibitionist, but lately things have changed.

Growing up, I was always the thinnest person in the room, maxing out at just over 120 pounds. I loved my body and, yes, how much everyone envied my slim stature. But that was before I gained more than 50 pounds over a span of three years. After being diagnosed with hypothyroidism, an under-active thyroid condition that caused me to put on the weight so rapidly, I started to feel differently about my body. For the first time in my life, I have a belly that I can’t quite get used to and more thighs than I can handle—and I hate it. If I had decided to do this five years ago, I wouldn’t have been so reluctant. But that was then. This is now.

As the studio door shuts with a gentle click, I’m escorted to a makeup chair where a friendly face greets me with a simple smile and words of encouragement. “You’ll do fine,” says hair and makeup stylist Javon Harris. “Once you get started, your nerves will fade away.”

Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes and prepare myself for what is about to come.

“More and more women are taking it upon themselves to redefine what it means to be sexy.”

During the 1920s, the art of boudoir photography began to really take off. At that time, it was illegal to have nudity in photographs, but American photographer Albert Arthur Allen pushed the envelope by posing nude women, typically more on the curvy side, against romantic backdrops. He wanted to show that sex appeal was “human appeal” by thrusting it into the public eye.

Fast-forward to the 1950s, when the focus shifted to pin-up girls—shapely starlets like Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge who appeared in Esquire magazine and were considered the ideal. These pin-up girls wore stockings, corsets, men’s ties and hats, and were among the first to use props in their photos.

Once magazines like Playboy came about, that form of photography became less fashionable, but it’s recently seen a resurgence. Over the last decade, boudoir photography has established itself as a successful add-on for wedding photographers as gifts for brides to give their grooms. And because of its emphasis on curvy physiques, it has also become a feminist declaration, a way for women to boost their own self-esteem and celebrate their bodies no matter what their size. “More and more women are taking it upon themselves to redefine what it means to be sexy,” says Kemp. “Here in Baltimore, women with all different sorts of backgrounds are inquiring about shoots and are deciding to show off their photos in more than just an album.”

In Maryland, buoyed by social media, there are dozens of boudoir photographers, both amateur and professional, jumping onto the scene almost daily. Many women like to mark special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, divorce, and even body-altering surgeries through these photos. Sharing them on social sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest has only fueled the movement. Kemp says that her clientele grew exponentially after she shared her work on Instagram. “Once I built my portfolio and had enough images to share online, I did,” she says. “People began emailing and calling left and right because it was something they really wanted to try.”

Most sessions are typically an hour-and-a-half to two hours long and cost anywhere from $100 to $1,500, with packages including everything from digital prints to photo albums to wall-sized canvases. For photographers like Lisa Mathews of Hunt Valley-based Lisa Robin Photography, boudoir is simply an added benefit to her already booming wedding photography business. “Boudoir is something for me to do during the week to sprinkle in my schedule, but I love it,” she says. “There’s no set demographic for this, you don’t have to lose weight to do it—you just have to be confident.”

Mathews and Kemp have seen women of all sizes, shapes, and ages in front of their cameras. Kemp says that her clientele are women who simply want to feel good about themselves. “It’s all about getting out of your own head,” she says. “As women, we need to remember what we can look like when we drop the ponytails or lose the sweatpants—you forget that you are a sexy woman and you want to feel sexy.”

There’s no right or wrong way to shoot boudoir, experts say, and each photographer has a distinct style. Photographers like Mathews tend to lean toward more editorial and high-fashion styles of images, while Kemp likes to toe the line between risqué and classic. “My brand is more sexy, glamorous, along the lines of Playboy,” Kemp says. “That line is easily crossed with just a change of the head or hips. I feel like my clients tend to want to walk that line without crossing it.”

Former Playboy model Joanna Tiger knows a thing or two about posing for seductive photos. Building on what she learned working for the men’s magazine for eight years, she began her boudoir business, Three Boudoir, in 2009. Although Tiger isn’t a photographer, she plays an integral role in the styling, posing, and training of her shoot stylists.

“I never thought I would use my Playboy experience for anything,” she says. “I mean never. I have degrees in biology and chemistry, who would’ve thought that it would ever come into play?”

Now with six locations across the U.S.—the first studio was in Annapolis—Tiger says that her company does more than just capture risqué images, they’re also promoting self-love. “Maybe they’re celebrating a divorce, or something like a double mastectomy or lumpectomy, or getting them before [the surgery] and then they come see us after they’re healed and ready to start a different journey with their body,” she says. “We also work with a lot of women who are victims of sexual assault or sexual abuse and they’re looking to reclaim their sexual agency.”

Capturing these images is only half the battle. Many women arrive feeling self-conscious and nervous. It’s the photographer’s job to create a sense of ease for every client they shoot. “This is an abnormal experience for people, the best thing I can do is be normal,” says Mathews. “The misconception is that these women are ultra-scandalous and used to this.” She typically dresses casually with no makeup to make the women feel less pressured to be flawless and has them create a playlist that will help them relax while they’re being photographed.

Takia Hansley, a 37-year-old Baltimore-based life coach, is what Kemp calls a “repeat offender” when it comes to boudoir photos. She has sat for three different sessions over the past two years. What began as an anniversary gift for her husband grew to mean so much more. “It’s a confidence booster,” she says. “After the first time I was like, ‘I need to do this like once every month.’ I felt so grown and sexy, like I could do anything. It’s like going out with your girls, it’s good for your soul.”

One thing that all photographers agree on is that women should always wear something they feel comfortable in. “You can always tell when a woman isn’t comfortable in what they chose to wear—it shows up in the pictures,” Mathews explains. The photographers do not provide clothing and it is up to the client to choose. Because every client is different, it’s also up to them to determine how much nudity will be involved. Some prefer a slight show of cleavage, while others may be willing to be completely nude.

“I never know what I want to wear,” Hansley admits. “I have such a good time doing the shoots that the clothes are always a secondary thought. I usually just peruse the internet until the very last minute and buy something that I hope will look sexy.”

Many photographers use beds, chaises, couches, fur rugs, and bathtubs to create various scenes for the shoot. And, of course, posing is also key. Over the years, certain positions—arched back, arms across the chest, body draped across the couch—have evolved as the go-to poses. In fact, this genre wouldn’t be boudoir without them.

“Everything we as photographers do is to accentuate what you like and minimize what you don’t,” explains Kemp, who often poses women lying on their sides to play up their curves. “Photoshop is a no-no. I don’t manipulate anybody’s body because I want you to walk out of here feeling confident, but I need you to be confident because you see you and not an idealized version.”

“I look in the mirror and there’s an audible gasp . . .‘Wow, I look amazing,’ I say to no one in particular.”

My hair and makeup are finished. I look in the mirror and there’s an audible gasp. It came from me. “Wow, I look amazing,” I say to no one in particular.

With my voluminous hair and sultry, vampy makeup, I slowly approach a leather bench in front of a beautifully made, queen-sized bed covered in satin sheets wearing nothing but my fiancé’s football jersey and black lace panties. “Take a deep inhale and let it out,” Kemp advises. I do as I’m told, and the camera begins to click with every move I make.

With each new pose I feel sexier, more confident, and definitely more in love with a body that I usually hate. I find myself not caring about my less-than-flat stomach or the stretch marks on my thighs. I realize that as long as I love the way I feel in my own skin, that’s all that matters. I emerge from Kemp’s studio two hours later feeling like a better version of myself—a self that I could love no matter what.

Martha Cooper adjusts the strap of the black camera bag around her neck as she comes upon a concrete Jersey wall at the end of a desolate South Baltimore street. She looks left, then right. Most people, at this juncture, might retreat to more familiar terrain, but Cooper presses on, navigating around the barrier and continuing along a trash-strewn path. A pair of stacked highway overpasses loom in the distance. “This is the way,” she says, in a tone of voice Lewis and Clark might recognize.

Dressed in a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes, the 75-year-old Cooper is as unpretentious as she is intrepid. A steady gaze and impish smile enhance her disarming presence. She is the cool aunt whose twinkling eyes say she’s seen things you wouldn’t believe, and she’s determined to share them.

Cooper has a knack for finding and photographing these untamed, vibrant places.

She traces that sort of freedom and empowerment to her maternal grandmother, Henrietta Szold, a prominent Jewish-American Zionist. Szold’s father was the rabbi at Temple Oleb Shalom in Southwest Baltimore, and she relentlessly advocated for a Jewish state and lived most of her life in Jerusalem. Szold, who passed away in 1945, had a school and research institute named after her, was inducted into the American Women’s Hall of Fame, and even appeared on Israeli postage stamps and currency. “I come from a feminist family,” says Cooper. “It’s a line of strong, independent women.”

Cooper graduated early from Forest Park High School at the age of 16. She also graduated early from Iowa’s Grinnell College, earning an art degree in just three years, and then headed to Thailand with the Peace Corps. There, she developed a keen interest in anthropology and an appreciation of the Thai hill tribes’ culture, especially their ornate embroidery and wax-resist dyed fabrics. Figuring she could parlay that into a career in museum work, Cooper earned a degree in ethnology from Oxford University, returned to the U.S., and got a job cataloguing artifacts at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.

She quickly grew bored, realizing that the artifacts didn’t interest her and working in a museum was too far removed from the action. She wanted to be out in the field. She’d been taking photographs since getting her first camera, a Brownie, from her father when she was just 3, and she had also enjoyed an independent photo project at Grinnell, so she took her camera and got to work.

After interning at National Geographic, she turned to newspaper photography, starting at The Narragansett Times in Rhode Island before landing a staff photographer position at the New York Post. The Post job piqued her anthropological interest as she explored the far reaches of New York City and met and photographed all sorts of people.

A photo essay she produced for the Post in the late 1970s (included in her book Street Play) changed the direction of her career. The piece was about “kids being creative,” she says. “All the kids in those pictures were making things and doing things.”

She scrolls through a few old images she has stored on her iPhone: children playing in water gushing from a fireplug, girls practicing dance moves, a group of teenagers making go-carts, and a boy with a pigeon. That boy, she says, introduced her to Dondi White, the first graffiti artist she ever met: “When Dondi explained graffiti to me, I was back in museum mode, back in ethnic art mode. Also, it was a super underground movement at the time, which was one of the reasons I was attracted to it. I felt as if I had been let in on a secret.”

Cooper shadowed Dondi and other early graffiti artists around train yards, on subway cars, and in the streets to shoot the burgeoning scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She documented that golden age of New York graffiti in Subway Art, her 1984 book with photographer/filmmaker Henry Chalfant, which went on to sell half a million copies and was dubbed “the [graffiti] movement’s Bible” by The New York Times. It established Cooper as graffiti’s foremost photographer and led the likes of Time magazine to declare, “Martha Cooper introduced street art photography to the world.”

It was a blessing and a curse. “I don’t want to be known as just a graffiti photographer,” she says. “It’s limiting and not really what I do.”

Cooper points out that she has always been interested in the culture framing the art as well. “One of the things I learned at Oxford is that you can’t just look at the art,” she says. “It has to have context. My pictures are the ones with context. To this day, I don’t want to simply take pictures of walls. To me, that’s boring. Anybody can do that. I’m trying to get the walls and some other thing. I like to see the process of people painting walls, how they do it, or I like to get some sense of community around the wall.”

Indeed, Cooper’s strongest work focuses on community, especially overlooked subcultures in urban areas. She has extensively photographed sidewalk shrines, Japanese tattoos, Haitian Vodou, Brazilian trash collectors called catadores, Chinese Lion dancing, and Puerto Rican casitas (“little houses”).

She has been obsessively shooting Sowebo since the mid-2000s. At the time, she’d inherited a little money and wanted to use the funds for a street photography project she wouldn’t otherwise get to do. She considered various spots around the world but was intrigued by returning to Baltimore, to a neighborhood not far from where the Szold family lived. During an early visit to Sowebo, Cooper spotted a child jumping on a mattress, which reminded her of the Street Play project. “It just looked right,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s the kind of neighborhood I want.’”

Against her real estate agent’s advice, she bought a house in Sowebo and started frequenting the neighborhood, often taking a Bolt bus from her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. Cooper figures she has taken well over 100,000 pictures in Sowebo. She acknowledges challenges—from rampant drug dealing to the amount of trash on the streets—but lauds residents for being “incredibly resilient and friendly. Every day, they transcend their circumstances.”

Cooper paired some of the Sowebo images with uncannily similar photos taken in Soweto, South Africa, during a 2012 artist residency. The resulting photo essay, “Soweto/Sowebo,” features virtually interchangeable scenes of block parties, children playing, storefronts, neighbors relaxing together, and even vegetables and fruits being sold from horse-drawn carts (Baltimore gave it a Best of Baltimore award in 2014). It showcases Cooper’s eye for detail, as well as her penchant to capture a sense of human resilience. Cooper hopes to eventually publish a book of Sowebo photos.

These days, Cooper rents out the Sowebo house and spends much of her time traveling to street art and graffiti festivals as a featured artist, honored guest, and/or official photographer. She photographed Germany’s notorious 1UP graffiti crew, which resulted in a new book, One Week with 1UP. Her popular Instagram feed (she currently has 195,000 followers) includes photos from recent trips to Sweden, Mexico, and Tahiti. It also includes pictures taken on the Fourth of July in Sowebo and at Dink’s compound.

While eating pizza at Zella’s, Cooper occasionally glances toward the street outside the restaurant’s large windows. It’s almost as if she’s afraid she might miss something by staying inside, or remaining stationary, for too long. Finally, she asks for a to-go box and packs up the remaining slices. “There’s an alley just a few blocks from here that I haven’t visited for a while,” she says. “It seems like there’s always something going on there.”

With that, Cooper grabs her camera bag and heads out the door.

The first old photograph Chris Whitaker reunited with its family, he discovered in a Montana antique shop. The black-and-white picture is a coming-of-age portrait of a boy, attired in a wool suit, tie, and pressed, white, short-collared shirt in the style of the day—about 1890. His hair is parted, there’s a hint of a smile above his dimpled chin, and on the back of the photo someone long ago scrawled the boy’s name and hometown: Samuel Reynolds, Kingman, Kansas.

The few words on the back also described young Samuel as “my cousin.” The vacationing Whitaker decided to track down the boy’s family, searching census records and ancestry databases. A grateful descendant on Samuel’s family tree came across his research and blog, which included the picture of Samuel, and later drove across the country to the same store and unearthed more than 40 other lost family photographs. Whitaker was elated.

“I just thought if someone found a photograph of my great-grandfather, I’d be thrilled,” says Whitaker in his north Baltimore home office. “It was really that simple.”

Over the past three years, the retired Whitaker has fleshed out the identities of hundreds of wayward vintage portraits, most of which he has stumbled across in the dustbins of Hampden’s antique, book, and curio shops. Placing these mysteriously adrift portraits with their loved ones, at times, has proved difficult for unexpected reasons.

Shortly after his initial success with Samuel’s portrait, for example, Whitaker contacted the West Virginia daughter of a woman in a lovely 1940s portrait via Facebook. Not only did the woman not respond, she blocked him. “I think it creeped out the woman when I messaged her and I told her I had a picture of her mother,” Whitaker recalls with a laugh. Ever since, he just scans the photographs and posts them on his blog, including the subjects’ names and the location where he found the photo, encouraging people to email him if they discover an ancestor. “It’s rewarding,” he says. “And I like the detective work.”

In one case, Whitaker provided a woman in her 80s with the last photograph of her dad—taken four days before he was killed in a plane crash when she was a girl. He connected Reed Young to a youthful portrait of his grandfather, who died before the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory program manager was born.

Whitaker’s found photos have taken him through time to the blocks of what was once “Little Bohemia” in East Baltimore, to the former stoop of former big-leaguer Edwin Americas Rommel, reportedly the first pitcher to deploy the knuckleball after the spitball’s banning in 1920. And to Fells Point, where a young wife named Ruth Collier sent photos of herself to her husband while he served in the South Pacific during World War II. (He returned home and the couple raised a family here.)

A Tennessee native, Whitaker became interested in genealogy in the mid-1980s when he couldn’t find pictures and found scant information about his maternal great-great-grandfather. He did, however, eventually locate his ancestor’s Civil War pension records at the National Archives. There, Whitaker read the firsthand account of the shot—from a Confederate rifle—that killed his great-great-grandfather at the Battle of Stones River.

Whitaker learned that his great-great-grandfather and both of his brothers had fled Tennessee after its secession to join Kentucky’s 9th Volunteers Infantry. All three gave their lives to the Union cause. “I don’t know if I fully absorbed their actions when I first came across that,” Whitaker says. “My appreciation, and pride in what they did, has continued to grow over the years.

“My younger brother, who is now deceased, and I grew up in Tennessee in the 1970s,” Whitaker continues, “when Confederate flags and Southern rock were all the rage and he gave me a lot of grief when I married my first wife because she was a Yankee from Philadelphia. [Learning about our great-great-grandfather] turned everything he believed on its head, which I thought was great.”

Charm City Fringe Festival
Nov. 1-11. Locations and times vary. $10-98. Now in its seventh year, this annual celebration of Baltimore’s non-traditional theater scene returns to the Bromo Arts District for 10 days of eclectic performances by more than 20 local and regional acts. From unconventional circus and variety acts to off-kilter comedy and theater pieces, catch quirky sets by rising stars such as BlueShift Dance, comedian Arielle Conversi, and award-winning performance artist Monica Hunken, pictured, during this cutting-edge festival.

Jim Burger: A Charmed Life
To Nov. 24. Creative Alliance. 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Free. From Baltimore Orioles fans leaving Memorial Stadium for the final time to women waiting under hair dryers at a Highlandtown salon, images by former Baltimore Sun photographer Jim Burger have encapsulated the city’s hidden beauty over the years. This month, view more than 130 photographs by the MICA grad during this retrospective exhibit at Creative Alliance, and return on November 8 for a special presentation of Burger’s full-color catalog of work.

Baltimore Craft Beer Festival
Nov. 3. $15-55, As the Old Line State’s craft beer scene has expanded over the past few years, this annual all-you-can-drink festival has grown along with it. Now in its fourth year, the Brewers Association of Maryland’s signature event will host more than 50 Maryland-only breweries at Canton Waterfront Park for an afternoon of sampling drafts from newcomers such as Checkerspot Brewing and Antietam Brewery, a homebrewing competition, and tons of local eats to soak up the suds.

Across the Bay 10K
Nov. 4. Chesapeake Bay Bridge. 6:55 a.m. $70-250. If you’ve ever driven across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and wondered what it would be like to run across it, you’re in good company. Lace up your sneakers for this early-morning run that draws more than 20,000 joggers to the starting line every year to soak up the views of the bay from 200 feet above the water. Stick around for live music, family-friendly activities, and all-you-can-drink options during the post-race festivities.

Travis Scott
Nov. 8. 201 W Baltimore Street. 7:30 p.m. $35.95-250. It has been a busy year for this 26-year-old rapper: His third album, Astroworld, released to rave reviews, he became a first-time parent with celebrity cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner, and this month, he will kick off his 25-city tour in front of a jam-packed crowd at Royal Farms Arena. Known for his unpredictable performances, this explosive artist will perform dance hits such as “SICKO MODE” and “BUTTERFLY EFFECT.” Who knows? Fans might even catch a glimpse of Kylie and Stormi in the audience.

Romare Bearden
Nov. 11- March 3, 2019. 830 E Pratt St.. Times vary. Free-$8. A collection of pieces by the prolific visual artist Romare Bearden, best known for his collages and other works depicting the realities of African-American life during the 1960s, will be on view at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in dedication to the artist’s tremendous impact on the community. See more than 70 of the late artist’s collages, watercolors, and drawings at this downtown museum and honor his depiction of African-American religion and spirituality.

Fiddler on the Roof
Nov. 13-18. 12 N Eutaw St.. Times vary. $99-250.50. Set in the tiny village of Anatevka in 1905, this time-honored musical about a poor milkman finding suitors for his five daughters in their Jewish community has become a Broadway classic. During its five-day run at the Hippodrome Theatre, experience the charming story that has won the hearts of audiences for decades with themes of change, tradition, and growth, featuring new movement from Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter.

BAZAART Holiday Art Market
Nov. 23-24. Jim Rouse Visionary Center 3rd Floor, 800 Key Hwy. Times vary. Free. Start the holiday season off right by supporting local artisans during the American Visionary Art Museum’s annual holiday art market, featuring tons of one-of-a-kind items that make early-bird shopping special. Held on Small Business Saturday, the market will highlight original creations made by more than 40 regional artists such as paintings, textiles, and jewelry. After you’re shopped out, take a free tour of the acclaimed Jim Rouse Visionary Center. avam.org.

BSO Pulse: Parquet Courts
Nov. 29. 1212 Cathedral St.. 8:30PM. $25-55. Now in its fourth season, this first-of-its-kind series that brings together some of the city’s best classic and indie artists returns with a collaboration between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and alternative rockers Parquet Courts. Don’t miss this three-set concert at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall that will feature a set by the BSO, followed by a few songs from this rising indie group’s latest album, Wide Awake!, before they join the BSO for a joint performance.

Miracle on 34th Street
Nov. 24-Jan. 1, 2019. W 34th St.. 6-11 p.m. Prices vary. Jim Pollock treats the Miracle on 34th Street tradition like a series of date nights. Every evening from Thanksgiving weekend to New Year’s Day for the past 29 years, he has come home from work, washed up, and opened his home and heart to the hordes of people who visit the 700 block of 34th Street in Hampden to see the “most outrageous Christmas lights” in Maryland. Known on the block for his 10-foot-tall tree made out of 104 hubcaps, he also welcomes about 1,200 visitors per night into the makeshift gallery in his living room to view work by local artists. “This tradition is about finding a moment of peace and togetherness in all of this chaos,” says Pollock. “We do this for the city that we love.”

My car was so steamy I feared the cops might flag me down. This was my first thought as I pulled out of Conrad’s Crabs & Seafood Market in Parkville with two dozen blue crabs, a tin of crab dip, deviled eggs, pints of cucumber tomato salad, two dozen steamed shrimp, and other foods to form a delicious crab feast. A graduate degree in journalism, and a childhood spent in Philadelphia, had not prepared me for the life of a crab wrangler. And, yet, here I was—with Old Bay in Smell-O-Vision in my sedan.

Our crab cover shoot wasn’t until the next day, so I rearranged my refrigerator jettisoning expired condiments I never needed in the first place (banana ketchup, really?), moved a shelf and hauled the steaming box of crabs and other items into cold storage.

The next day, my car still smelling of seafood seasoning, I piled everything back into the trunk, and drove the steamy subjects and accouterments to photographer Kate Grewal’s bungalow in Towson.

Kate, creative director Amanda White-Iseli, and food and prop stylist Giulietta Pinna, carried props, including ceramic bowls, table ware, decorative craft paper, a variety of utensils, serving bowls, and other items from the trunk of her tiny car to Kate’s dining-room-cum-studio. “Why is it that food stylists always drive the smallest cars?” mused Amanda.

In the four hours that followed, with crabs splayed on top of blue seamless paper taped to Kate’s floor, Giulietta got down on hands and knees to glam up her subjects on set—hand-selecting the biggest boys, wiping away crab spice with a Q-Tip, and positioning the pile just so to create our mouth-watering cover image.

Also on hand was our designated “hand model” Catina Smith, a cook at Magdalena and Kate’s good friend. Giulietta and I got in on the act, spread out across the floor pretending to crab cracks, wield mallets, and squeeze lemons. As we contorted or bodies into Twister-like positions, we agreed that it’s true what they say about modeling—it’s harder than it looks, especially when you have to lay on a floor.

Meanwhile, I also shucked ears of corn on Kate’s lawn and browned corn fritters and lobster mac-and-cheese with a blow torch. Kate served us fruit and granola when she wasn’t shooting. Amanda gave artistic direction. (“That crab is bothering me off to the side,” she said. “It looks like it wants to join the whole pile.”) Within hours, team had shot the cover, a crab feast spread and a variety of sides for our page highlighting ways to make your accompaniments special.

While I try not to eat the props on most shoots, I’m a sucker for sides. I taste-tested the lobster mac and cheese from Stone Mill Bakery, moved onto the cucumber salad from Conrad’s, the corn fritters from Gourmet Again, and the potato salad from Graul’s.

By the afternoon, the shoot was done and what was many months in the planning had finally come to fruition. The feeling of seeing the magazine print, published, and soon online was almost as satisfying as the food from the feast. Almost.

In 2011, Lawrence Burney started a local music and arts blog by the name of True Laurels. As a Baltimore native, he saw a hole in the city’s ever-evolving media landscape and in no time evolved his web-only format into an indie zine and now today’s integral print publication, featuring compelling photography and both first-person and reported stories on Baltimore’s black creatives. On the eve of True Laurels Issue 04, we sat down with Burney to talk about his musical upbringing, his gig at Vice, and the importance of giving back to the place where he grew up.
 
 

How did you get into writing? 

My interest didn’t start until like my 12th grade year. I got into a lot of trouble in school. I was suspended for behavior-related things. I had this one writing teacher at City in ninth grade and we never liked each other. We always clashed. In the 11th grade, I had him again for college writing. We got into altercations—all this crazy stuff—but in the midst of all that, I still got As and Bs on all of my assignments. That’s something I kept in the back of my head: I must be pretty okay at writing if this guy, who has every reason to fail me, is still giving me As and Bs.

When it was time to start applying for colleges, I decided I was going to go to school for journalism. It wasn’t like a thing I did since I was a little kid; I stumbled into it because I needed to do something with my life.  

Do you come from a creative family?

My mother is a writer. She actually went to University of Baltimore at the same time I did, for creative writing. She’s also a musician. She and my grandfather were in a jazz-funk band together, Wolf Pack, so I would travel with them to local gigs and be in studio sessions with them. We all lived in the same house for a good part of me growing up, so my alarm clock was my grandfather playing his guitar. He toured with George Clinton for like two tours as the drummer, and my mother opened up for Gil Scot-Heron one time on Charles Street when I was probably eight. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I knew he was important by the way people talked about him. 

So music was a part big of your upbringing.

In high school, my reputation amongst my friends was just knowing a lot of music. I would make them mixes and just impose my will on making them like the music that I liked. It’s basically what I’m still doing now. Then my daughter was born when I turned 20. I was feeling pressure from that. I had to do something. I had to gain some clarity on my life’s path. So I just combined those interests—the writing and the music. It was the end of 2011 when I made the True Laurels’ WordPress.  

What was the rap scene like back then?

It was constructed in a completely different way at that time. Growing up, it was just battle rappers. Baltimore was more of a club music city. This whole rap scene really started in 2014 when Young Moose and Lor Scoota got hot. Before that, some artists like Los, Skarr Akbar, and Comp had some national success, but because technology wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, people didn’t look at it as “the Baltimore scene.” Even when I started True Laurels, that wasn’t the case. When I went to UB was the first time I even started learning about central Baltimore. That part of town was not a place that most black people from Baltimore really knew too much about. We’re on the east and west sides.  

Whereas, for at least the last decade, the local and national media has considered Baltimore’s “music scene” to be headquartered in Station North. Station North was just North Avenue when I was growing up. There was a Tyrone’s Chicken that I would go to with my grandfather after we played basketball at Druid Hill. He knew about the Copycat and all that because he was a musician, but I was never exposed to it. It was all new to me. The Windup Space. The Ottobar. It was an exciting time because I was being put in a new environment. I didn’t ever party with alternative types of black people or artsy white kids. I didn’t hang out around queer people or anybody who thought a little differently. That just wasn’t my upbringing. But I was learning about a new part of Baltimore while staying in tune with what was coming out of the parts of the city I was familiar with and bringing it all together.    

You founded True Laurels as a music and arts blog in 2011. 
I wanted to document the scene but also really try to paint a full picture of what inner-city, black Baltimore is. If you left it up to a place like the Urbanite, where I interned in 2012, you’d think Baltimore was only Hampden, Charles Village, Station North, and Mt. Vernon. This is still a struggle in the perception of Baltimore. When I’m in other places, people only know about the crime, the drugs, The Wire. That’s people’s main point of reference. And The Wire is a good show—mostly accurate in my opinion. I resisted watching it until I was in my 20s, but I ended up watching and it actually helped me make more sense of my own life. Even this whole Gun Trace Task Force can be tied back to things that were talked about on that show.  

Speaking of the task force, your profile of local rapper Young Moose in Issue 03 was a great piece of journalism. 
The problem is there hasn’t been someone who is actually a black person from the inner city writing these stories, with the nuance to show that black people from Baltimore are a very diverse group. This is an almost 65 percent black city, so not everybody is going to be living on a block that’s mostly vacant. That’s a lot of people’s reality, and part of my life I lived in those kinds of neighborhoods, too, but it’s not everything. There’s diversity that needs to be depicted, and I’m trying to pull all of those pieces together.     

You are also a staff writer for Noisey, the online music publication of Vice, where you’ve written a number of stories on Baltimore artists. Do they give you a lot of creative freedom? They put a lot of trust in me. Through Vice, I’ve been able to tell stories about Baltimore that just don’t get told. I think stories like the one I wrote on Young Moose help people understand what it’s like for a person like him to grow up in a city like Baltimore—how they’re perceived by institutions, and how that trickles down into every part of their life. I do want to expand my voice and speak to different audiences, but if I can’t speak to the people that I come from, that’s not a win. That’s not enough for me.  

You’ve recently done deep dives into the youth-driven music scenes of other cities like New Orleans and Johannesburg. Does that inform the work you do in Baltimore, or vice versa? 
True Laurels has helped me form what I want to be as a journalist. Because I’m from a city like Baltimore—misunderstood and oversimplified— I’m really interested in regionality and how the politics of a city affect the way that the young people there operate. I have a lot of curiosity about how things work, here and around the world. To me, the music is not just the music. Music is the best introduction to any society. That’s why it has to be taken seriously.  

You live in Brooklyn, but you come back to Baltimore every week? 
At the very least, I’m here every 10 days, spending time with my daughter, trying to stay updated on what’s going on. I’m constantly in communication with the younger musicians on Instagram and YouTube. I’m 27 now and I realize that I am in some ways an elder statesman for these young people. Lor Choc’s 19. Deetranada’s 16. Young people drive culture, so you have to embrace them. Even when changing True Laurels from a fan zine to a more conventional magazine, I had to ask myself: what would a 17-year-old Lawrence think about this? In hip-hop culture, presentation and looking fresh matters. But there are artists here who are now starting to get traction and make it believable that you can actually get somewhere. And that’s why I feel encouraged to keep going—who knows what could happen next?  

You’ve talked about True Laurels existing as documentation—a physical record of black culture in Baltimore. 
You have to know the history and apply that to the present to know what’s coming next. That’s why, every week, I’m trying to post archival black Baltimore-related footage on the True Laurels Instagram. It’s important to inform people there has always been cool shit going on in this place for a long time. It’s helping me paint an even broader picture of Baltimore, and like The Wire, it’s helping me make sense of my own life.  

Issue 4 comes out in June. Who are you really excited about right now? 
Lor Choc is one of my favorite artists. I’m super impressed by her creativity. She’s a great storyteller, which I really enjoy. She has her own approach. But it’s not just artists. . . . I’m excited to see any young person from this place make strides on the national stage. Coming from here, a lot of people don’t think they can make it. The whole crab-in-the-barrel thing has become the narrative that people accept. I want people to recognize how amazing Baltimore is. If I can play any role in having less people settle, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do publications. I’m trying to do film. I’m trying to do movies. The same way [film director] Ryan Coogler incorporated Oakland into the Black Panther, I want to do that for Baltimore. I’m trying to diversify the perception. I have no finish line for what True Laurels can be. I want to push it to every height that it could possibly achieve.  

Scrolling through our Instagram feeds, there was always one account that would make us take pause. The arresting photographs from Noah Scialom combined impeccable timing with an innate ability to capture human, and humorous, moments.
 

Scialom, whose work appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Time, The Sun, and City Paper, took his own life on Tuesday at just 28 years old.
 

“He had this uncanny ability to be near something crazy,” said photographer and Baltimore contributor Matt Roth, who was a bit of a mentor to Scialom and got him freelance work at Patuxent Publishing. “A 16-wheeler exploded on I-83? Noah was a few cars behind it. Noah showed up early for a varsity soccer game, and he was there when a JV soccer player was kicked in the chest and almost died . . . Somehow there’s always an adventure happening around him.”
 

“Noah will go down in history as a street photographer. He was made for it. He wasn’t scared of conflict. He relied on his wit and warm charm to disarm anyone suspicious of his intentions. He was a great talker, but his real genius was how genuinely interested he was in whoever he talked to,” said Roth. 

According to a biography on the American Visionary Art Museum website, Scialom began exploring photography as a teenager while living in Rome with his mother.  

“It was magical,” Scialom said. “I basically grew up on the streets, going wherever I wanted. It helped me develop an ability to assimilate and figure out things quickly.”  

This man-on-the-street approach stayed with him later in life, both in his freelance work and his famed Instagram account (@knowaphotographer), which had more than 17,000 followers. In 2015, Baltimore magazine awarded him with “Best Instagram” and, the following year, Time featured him as one of the best accounts in the country.  

Scialom’s photography was especially poignant surrounding the Baltimore Uprising, in which he captured an array of perspectives that weren’t being shown on the national news.   

“Noah was my first recommendation to those that wanted a real eye in Baltimore,” said Heather Keating, communications manager at the Creative Alliance. “His coverage of a guy rocking Michael Jackson moves on a box truck during the height of the Uprising led us to connect with Dimitri Reeves and bring his slick moves and positivity—werewolf mask and all—to the streets of Highlandtown.”  

It was in August 2015 when his photograph of a city police officer waving his gun towards a group of dirt-bike riders in Druid Hill Park led to the officer being placed on administrative duty.  

“Photography is like a religious practice,” Scialom said, “because it’s largely about opening yourself up to the flow of life. If you aren’t out there with an agenda, things come to you.”  

Seemingly always at the right place at the right time, Scialom had a knack for relating to people from all walks of life—whether children playing in the streets, politicians at formal events, or a group of artists at a warehouse party.  

“Baltimore has lost an edge, a real talent, a microscope,” Keating said. “He gave us access to a reality of Baltimore life most of us don’t see.”

Picturing Prince

Steve Parke (Cassell Illustrated) 

No matter what musical style you favor, you have to admit it: There will never be another like Prince Rogers Nelson. The high heel-wearing, guitar-shredding icon cemented himself in a category all his own, transcending musical styles and breaking all the rules. Baltimore artist Steve Parke was along for the ride, capturing Prince at the height of his fame. And that story, which Parke details in a new book that is part memoir, part photographic portrait, is as extraordinary as any of the myths surrounding Prince. Parke had worked for Prince for nearly a decade as an artist, designing tour T-shirts and even an album cover, when, in 1997, the Purple One asked him if he could use a camera. What followed were years of images that captured The Artist with an intimacy never before seen. (Where else can you see Prince shooting hoops wearing a belly chain?) Paired with Parke’s remembrances that are at times poignant, at others hilarious (like a story about Prince’s reaction to George Clinton eating fried chicken), Picturing Prince is an entertaining tribute that will keep Prince’s spirit alive for generations to come.

Talking Pictures: How To Watch Movies

Ann Hornaday (Basic Books)

Ann Hornaday says upfront that she isn’t your typical cinephile. The longtime Washington Post film critic details in her new book that her arrival at her chosen career path was not exactly intentional—after working as Gloria Steinem’s assistant at Ms. Magazine and writing film-related stories for The New York Times, she got her first critic’s job at the Austin American Statesman. But, she argues, the fact that she’s something of a self-taught cinephile might be exactly the reason she’s an ideal authority to help us decide what makes a film good. She breaks down movies by their structural components—starting with the screenplay, detailing cinematography and editing, and ending with directing. She enlightens us with her expertise and entertains us with her sometimes surprising anecdotes and opinions (for instance, that Nicholas Cage is our generation’s Bertolt Brecht for embracing the artifice of acting with his outsized portrayals). Talking Pictures is as fun to read as it is informative. And trust us—you’ll never watch a movie the same way again.

You shot literally thousands of pictures of Prince, starting in 1997. How did you ever pick what was going to go in the book?
I went through the images I had and started to really look at what, to me, was worth showing. There’s a combination of things here. One was that the technology in the cameras back then was not the best. These were really early digital cameras and they were meant to be used with flashes, and the nature of working for Prince is that we weren’t ever really that organized. It was like, “Let’s just do this,” and there wasn’t a lot of structure to the process. It was my first attempt to use strobes, so I set them up, and all I cared about was getting a well-exposed photo. It was correctly exposed, but there was no drama to it, it was very flat . . . There were inherent issues to my eye with the photos, and I wanted to make sure that I could fix that as I could, and fortunately, contemporary technology allows you to do some of that. And also what I thought would be interesting to people – what I would consider the best shot would not be as interesting because it didn’t reveal as much about Prince as a person, if that makes sense. I tried to look for stuff that would be interesting to people, and, of course, good photos. So that was my selection process.

Were there ever times for you when you would look around and think, what the heck am I doing here?
Over time, you almost couldn’t do that because it would be like if you were driving on the highway at 70 miles an hour, and all of a sudden thinking, oh my god, why am I doing this? I’m hurtling along inside this thing that could crash and I’m manipulating this thing,” and then you’d forget how to drive and just crash your car. It was the same feeling with Prince. I couldn’t stop too much and look at it because it would freak me out. Once I met Prince, which was a big hurdle in the sense that I just had to be cool about it, then everything from there on out, was like, Ok, this is the way thing’s are, we’re going to do things that you don’t get to do in normal life. He’s going to ask me to do things that are seemingly ridiculous to an outside person, but I’m just going to do it, and do it the best I can. I talk a little bit about when he was doing the most beautiful girl in the world video, and he comes running into my office and gestures to his back. And when he turns around, I can see he couldn’t get his zipper up, and I’m like, ok, I’m zipping up Prince’s outfit. It’s a weird moment where first, you’re helping someone with their clothing, which is fine, but then you look at it in context and it’s like he came in because he’s comfortable with me. Those are the moments that are a little surreal. 

Were there ever times that you were starstruck by him?
Most of my starstruck moments with him were watching him perform. He would play out of Paisley Park a lot. I could be right up next to him in the studio and he’s laying down a guitar track and I could be like, oh, that’s really cool, just like he was some friend of yours who’s playing the guitar for you. But he could be on stage in the back of Paisley Park with a crowd of 100 to 200 people or on the soundstage with 700 people and when he was on stage, just watching him was like, Oh my god, this guy is so good. You just couldn’t help but see that no matter what. A couple of times he called me out from the stage. He saw me and said something over the microphone, and of course, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about but me. And it broke that weird moment of, “whoa I’m watching Prince.”

What was the different between him on stage and off stage?
On stage, everything he did he did confidently. I’d see them do sound checks, and there were things that didn’t go as planned, but he was a professional and sometimes they’d stop and fix the problem, and sometimes they’d just go right through. You couldn’t tell if it was a mistake because he had such a mastery of music and the stage. The difference in him off stage, and dealing with him on a personal level, was that he was like everyone you know—he was a little cocky about what he did (laughs), he would discuss world events, and in some instances he was a little vulnerable about his past and opened up to me about his childhood. It was kind of like what do you say to that? It’s hard because you’re in a little bit of an odd position because it’s not just someone you’re friends with, it’s more, like you’re my boss and I’m just going to listen. He was very quiet off stage. I could hear him pretty well all the time, but he talked in a register that would make people ask, “Did you hear what he said?” I’m not kidding, he has this frequency where he spoke sometimes that he could speak at a normal level and it was hard to hear. But people in the same room as me, when he left, would say, what was he talking about? 

And I’m sure no one wanted to ask him to repeat himself.
Yeah, you didn’t want to go down that path. 

I know there’s been depictions of Prince, on Chappelle’s Show, for example, that show how quiet he was.
You want to know who does a really freaky imitation of Prince? Fred Armisen. The way he talks, the way he captures those little nuances… the first time I saw him do it, it gave me the chills. I mean, in person, Prince wasn’t whispering in someone’s ear to pass along a message like in the skit. Jaime Foxx does it pretty good too, and he even gets the voice down. I think people always assume that Prince spoke in a high voice because he did a lot of falsetto, but he was totally baritone.

Do you have favorite Prince moments?
Obviously, moments like when he talked to me about what I was going to name my son. Part of it is that I was having the conversation with someone I knew, with no pretense that he was my boss, or Prince, or any of that. Going bowling with Prince was fun. But some of the times that I was doing that I would be mildly delirious because I hadn’t slept much because I had been working so hard and it would be at 2 in the morning. He was just nailing strike after strike after strike and people were clapping for him and clapping for everybody, even me when I got a strike. It’s kind of hard to top that stuff. And I had a lot of those moments that were like, wow, that was really cool.

Flickering Treasures

Amy Davis (Johns Hopkins University Press) 

In Baltimore, we don’t have to look far to find vestiges of cinema’s golden age—venues like the sparkling Senator or the majestic Parkway that remind us of a time when all our problems vanished with a night by the big screen. What we might not realize is how many more of these cinemas once existed in Baltimore, and that’s where Davis comes in. She photographs old movie houses—both those that are decayed or have been repurposed and the ones that remain grand and glorious. Juxtaposing current conditions with historical photos, Davis shows how much time has altered the face of our city. Her book is a comment on this transition, and a reminder that change is the only constant.

A Saturnalia of Bunk

H.L. Mencken, edited by S.T. Joshi
(Ohio University Press)

There’s a reason Henry Louis Mencken is called the Sage of Baltimore. His sardonic wit, explosive exuberance, and wry critical eye shaped the spunky attitude of our city. But while many in Baltimore know Mencken for his newspaper column “The Free Lance”—which he wrote six days a week for The Baltimore Evening Sun from 1911 to 1915—few have actually read them. In this collection of those columns, we get a sense of the issues that defined Mencken’s voice—freedom from censorship and battling against temperance and other moral reform movements among them—and the passion behind a man hellbent on ridding his community of, as he writes, “stupidity, flapdoodle, and buncombe.” 

A Beautiful Ghetto

Devin Allen (Haymarket Books)

Looking through the pages of A Beautiful Ghetto, it’s astounding that Devin Allen’s professional career took off a mere two years ago. His photographs—which capture strength and beauty, as well as disparity and decay—transport viewers through the protests following the death of Freddie Gray and into the streets and lives of the people of West Baltimore where he grew up. The words that accompany these photographs (by the likes of author Wes Moore and poet Tariq Touré) give context to what Allen’s photographs mean to Baltimore—particularly as he has chosen to remain here, teaching photography in his spare time to young people from his community.

See our full interview with photographer Devin Allen.

Way Down in the Hole

Ed Norris with Kevin Cowherd
(Apprentice House Press)

Ed Norris doesn’t pull punches. That’s evident from his memoir’s opening, in which the former Baltimore police commissioner puts us at the moment he hit rock bottom: He is lying on a jail cell floor at a federal prison, holding a roll of newspapers at the door with his feet to keep the rats out. Norris candidly chronicles how he reached this point—from his beginnings as a drug-busting New York detective to his fast rise in Baltimore and the corruption case that brought it all down. Norris, who now co-hosts The Norris & Long Show on radio station 105.7 The Fan, gives us true-life versions of the tales that made The Wire famous, and ultimately reminds us how difficult being a cop can be.

On April 25, 2015, a young photographer from West Baltimore clicked the shutter of his camera as a crowd of riot gear-clad police officers dashed in front of Camden Yards, chasing a man with a kerchief obscuring his face. The photographer, Devin Allen, uploaded the photo to social media, and the rest is history. 

Within a few days, his image graced the cover of Time magazine, and Allen has since traveled the world on assignment. But he returns to some of his original subjects—the people and streets
of Baltimore—in his first book, A Beautiful Ghetto, reminding us where his heart lies. Here, he reflects on some of his
favorite photographs from the book.

“This is one of the images that made me want to start my youth program. These boys are only 8 or 9 years old, but there’s resilience and fearlessness to them. What sparked the Uprising was the fire from the youth. What’s changing Baltimore for the better is their desire for something better.”

“This photograph speaks about motherhood to me. A lot of the press about my community is negative. We never celebrate the positive. These mothers work so hard. This woman might be a single mom, working several jobs to provide for her kids, which is a beautiful thing. I’m a mama’s boy. My mom left my father and busted her ass to take such good care of me.”

“This was a couple of days after Freddie Gray’s funeral. This woman stood up at a rally and said, ‘As a woman, as a mother, I see only men talking here.’ She was so passionate, and it made me think that we are always talking about black men and we forget about our women sometimes.”

“In the days after the Baltimore Uprising, the schools were closed and everyone was out and about. This building was used on [TV]. It had been neglected for a while, but the report claimed incorrectly that it had been burned during the unrest. I feel like this image froze a moment in time, and shows the poverty we live in. But I also get a sense of peace and community.”

Phyllis Langley (@lifeofphylly)

If you were on a deserted island and could only bring one thing what would it be?
AG: My cat, Trippy Cat.

LC: A 6-pack of Flying Dog’s Bloodline.

What is your favorite photo on your Instagram account?
AG: We recently did a day of featuring dog pictures, which were a lot of fun.

LC: It’s also cool to see pictures of people in their natural environment, like their studio or living room.

What do you love photographing the most?
AG: I love photographing people and getting to go to coffee shops and sit down and just talk to them.

Mary Ellen LaFreniere (@steelcutflowerco)

Ian J. Bell (@ianjaredbell)

What is your guilty pleasure?
AG: Pitango [Gelato] and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

LC: Lately, tacos from Clavel. And I don’t totally feel guilty about it.

How has social media enabled The Bmore Creatives to grow?
LC: People searching through hashtags and locations helps them find us. We wouldn’t exist without Instagram because our way of growing a following in the beginning was commenting on people’s photos and liking them. Social media means everything to Baltimore Creatives.

Who is your idol?
AG: Beyoncé. Also Lane Harlan, the owner of W.C. Harlan, because she’s such a boss.

Rosemary Kourdoglou (@officegoth)

Olivia Witherite (@oliviawitherite)

If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
AG: We would love to live in Europe.

What do you hope people get out of seeing the pictures you share?
LC: I hope people who live in Baltimore can see the city from a new perspective. But also, for people who don’t live here, it’s nice when someone stumbles upon our feed and realizes they may have had a totally different idea of what Baltimore was like.

What’s next for The Bmore Creatives?
AG:We have an event coming up called Baltimore IRL, a pop-up gallery at Wet City featuring photographs by some of Instagram’s most avid photographers.

A cacophony of construction greets me as I enter Highlandtown’s Y:ART Gallery: the ripping of bubble wrap, the clatter of ladders, and the thumping of hammers. All this announces, before I observe a single frame on the stark white walls, the installation of a new show by world-renowned local photographer Connie Imboden, which is the first time her work is on display in Baltimore in 13 years. I spot the artist standing nearby, and surprisingly, she seems immune to all the commotion. She watches patiently, draped in her customary all-black attire, as Connie Imboden: A Retrospective comes to life. Instead of appearing stressed or anxious, she is gracious and enthusiastic as she dashes up to me and reaches for my arm. “Let me show you what I’ve been talking about,” she says.

Imboden leads me through a hallway lined with frames leaning against the walls to an open room. We walk to the far wall, and she turns toward a smaller photograph that is resting on the floor. Imboden watches me as I take it in. In this work, a man gazes downward, with one of his arms loosely extended above his head, an eerie red light illuminating the background. It has a decidedly classical feel, with rich color and detail, and as with the rest of Imboden’s work, it seems almost impossible that the image is a photograph.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell Imboden. “It makes me think of those paintings from the Renaissance, where Jesus is being taken down from the cross.” She smiles. I would come to understand that this way of engaging with an observer is typical of Imboden, who, even after a more than 30-year career, still craves discussion and new stimuli. “This is my favorite, I think,” she says. “I still don’t know what he reminds me of, though. Something . . .” She rubs her fingers together, searching for words.

Her reverie is broken by Juli Yensho, Y:ART’s owner, who has a question about the placement of a piece. I take a moment to peer across the gallery at the beginnings of Imboden’s show, which spans a career that has placed her work in collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. There are early prints, where faces float in water surrounded by the reflections of finger-like trees, and her more abstract, midcareer works where body parts—feet, breasts, torsos—serve as sculptural elements. Imboden’s latest photographs, where figures are shot through scratched mirrors and imbued with color, stand apart from the rest, but it’s easy to see a connecting thread—all of the images dance between this world and another, playing with our perception of reality.

Imboden catches me a few minutes later, toward the front of the exhibition. She’s still thinking about her favorite piece, she says, and wants to share more insight. “I think what makes it so special is that he seems like a puppet,” she says, “like he’s being controlled by an unseen force.” She gestures toward a print in which a dark form looms over a face submerged in water. “This is one of my earlier works, and you can see how that thread connects here. And I think in many ways, I see myself that way as an artist. Like I’m a channel for a higher power.”

I didn’t realize it then, but I would soon learn how this concept has propelled her career. How it has shaped her from a young woman exploring her identity to a confident, focused artist who, despite the fickleness of the art world, has stayed true to her passion. And how her exploration of this belief of artist as medium has allowed Imboden, once again, to reinvent herself and create some of the best art of her career.

Though it was a year filled with political and social turmoil for most of America, 2016 was a good year for Imboden. “Really, really good. I haven’t had a year like this since the late 1980s,” the 63-year-old artist says, which is a statement that speaks as much to her longevity as to her recent success. “I guess I was ready, I was due.”

We’re sitting in Imboden’s two-story studio that she built next to her house in Ruxton. Upstairs is her shooting space, where a large piece of mirrored Plexiglas stands in the middle of the room. Downstairs are Imboden’s and her assistant’s desks. Imboden constructed these buildings on land that was a gift from her mother and they stand adjacent to her childhood home. When you arrive at the hilltop spot, you leave the bustle of the highway and enter an artist’s enclave, complete with whimsical sculptures that line the winding driveway. The property is idyllic, with beautiful trees, delicate stone paths, and a tiled pool, where Imboden takes her water photographs. This setting stands in stark contrast to the dark, challenging photos that have resulted from these sessions.

Imboden, too, is different in person than her work might suggest. She’s light-filled, warm, and engaging. She isn’t afraid to dive into deep topics, exploring the meaning of her work, the difficulties of the art world, and the source of her inspiration. But this is leavened by a keen sense of humor—for example, she jokes to me that it’s nice to have some space between her and her neighbors, especially during night shoots with nude models.

Imboden’s latest creative burst started when her wife, Patricia Dwyer, took her to see a live broadcast of the opera Lulu. Though Imboden found Alban Berg’s music harsh and dissonant, she was blown away by South African artist William Kentridge’s staging, which evoked German expressionism. “The way that they portrayed [Lulu], the prostitute, as being naked on stage [was that] she was fully clothed, but they took a piece of paper and just drew a breast. And she was so naked, so raw. I’ve always been attracted to that period of time, when the angst expressed was so real. I was mesmerized.”

About a month later, Imboden began shooting her latest set of images, segmenting the reflection of a mannequin’s torso on her model’s body, playing with the placement of scratched fragments of mirrors, and adding colored fabric to the background to create an unearthly mood. When she looked at them later, “I thought, ‘Wow, here’s German expressionism,’” she says. It sparked an enthusiasm that was shared by others.

“What’s remarkable about her new work is what’s also remarkable about all her work—Connie is willing and able to photograph our fears and insecurities in an abstract way that makes us more willing to confront them,” says Arthur Ollman, the founding director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, who curated an exhibition of Imboden’s work there. It’s “not the usual way of making pictures of pretty bodies. Instead, she reaches below the surface of people’s beings and challenges us to recognize what we fear most. Her work is less about the body, and more about the psyche.”

“It’s really exciting to see what, for me, is the best stuff she’s ever done,” says long-time friend Susan Waters-Eller, who is an artist and professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). “Something really unique has emerged out of this vision that she’s propelled all these years. It’s amazing what you can get when you’ve been at something for so long.”

That support is what led to her retrospective at Y:ART. After a 13-year break from the local gallery scene, Imboden hadn’t considered showing her work in Baltimore. But a friend she’d gone to kindergarten with mentioned the year-old space, and after touring it—and feeling excited about her new work—Imboden thought, “Why not?” Yensho was thrilled. “She is such a dear person,” she says. “It is my hope to keep her star shining brightly for many years to come.”

What’s particularly amazing about Imboden’s art is that she often can’t explain where it comes from. For instance, I ask her how she knows that she’s created something that transcends, and she stops and thinks. “It kind of takes my breath away,” she says a moment later, “but I don’t know what it means. It reminds me of something but I don’t know what that is.”

She continues: “When I think of my work, there’s clearly a thread from the beginning to now. And I think that thread is the intuitive piece of it, the exploration of it and how that lends toward being a channel.”

Imboden first picked up on this concept in graduate school at the University of Delaware. One day during a critique—a process she hated—she put up a piece with a woman’s face duplicated by her reflection in the water. “And somebody said, ‘Oh it looks like a Janus face,’ and everybody else said, ‘Oh, it’s a Janus face.’ I had no idea who Janus was, but I found out he was the Roman god who was the gatekeeper, who looked forward and backward at the same time. I thought, ‘Wow, how could I make an image that is so resemblant of that god, not knowing who that god was?’ So I started exploring.”

Imboden has always been given to exploration. But it wasn’t until she discovered photography at age 17 that her investigations began to bear fruit.

In her 2009 collection of photographs, Reflections: 25 Years of Photography, she writes that she was introduced to the art form by her mother. In the summer of 1970, before Imboden’s senior year of high school, Mary Sawyers Imboden handed her daughter a summer school catalog for MICA, with a basic photography class circled. “How my mother knew I should be a photographer is one of the great mysteries of life. Our family was full of doctors and bankers, but no artists,” she writes. “This suggestion of hers was seemingly out of the blue, but in reality was an intuitive insight. She knew 16-year-old me better than anyone else in the world (far better than I knew myself) and saw the latent creative energy waiting to be channeled.”

Photography came quickly to Imboden and “looking through the camera lens was a perfectly natural experience for me,” she writes. Soon, she was experimenting with the effect of water and mirrors on the human body, drawn to their warping perspective. She began to notice that her work felt psychological, reflecting her own fears and pain. Even her attraction to water had that element—she was terrified of its murky depths after almost drowning as a child.

“I think she had gone through so much with being gay, and trying to figure that whole thing out. And not feeling successful in the traditional sense in school [or] that she had a path. Then she started photography, and that just anchored her,” says Imboden’s wife of 12 years, Patricia Dwyer. “Some of those earlier pieces that are fractured self-portraits say a lot about what she was feeling as a young woman.”

Imboden noticed that her work had a cathartic effect. “When I was younger, I was just filled with heaviness, and through photography, I confronted a lot of the stuff that I felt like I couldn’t put into words,” she says. “It’s been through photography that I’ve been able to get in touch with this darkness that I know very well. . . . It seems that all I have to do is start photographing and darkness flows out of me. It still amazes me because I don’t feel the darkness, I feel kind of the opposite. But the darkness is still very much a part of me.”

It was also cathartic to find kindred spirits within Baltimore’s arts community. During the 1970s, she, Waters-Eller, and others formed the Women’s Art Community, which aimed to promote work of underrepresented female artists. Perhaps that artistic camaraderie aided in her analysis of intuitive insight, because she discovered Carl Jung and his explanation of the collective unconscious—his theory that humans share a portion of their unconscious minds, made up of latent memories from our ancestors and evolutionary past. “I was very attracted to his explanation of how art is created—a connection to ourselves, the unconscious, where we store all of the stuff that’s too uncomfortable to deal with,” Imboden says. “But it was also the possibility of connecting to something much larger.” Imboden’s attraction to this concept could itself be called an example of the collective unconscious at work—her father, John Imboden, was a psychoanalyst who was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, Jung’s friend and contemporary.

Armed with this knowledge, Imboden found new creative freedom, and out came works that resonated with larger and larger audiences, with solo exhibitions at institutions like the Centro de la Fotographia in Lima, Peru, and the Galerie Esther Woerdehoff in Paris. Waters-Eller attributes art patrons’ reactions to Imboden’s work as evidence of the shared unconscious. “It’s amazing how people respond to it,” Waters-Eller says. “I think people are encouraged by seeing things that remind them that there’s a lot more mystery than modern life would make us think.”

But Imboden knows well that the attention of art patrons can be fleeting. She first noticed the shift after Sept. 11, 2001.

“It was like our values changed, our aesthetic changed. Artwork has become much safer, not as challenging, and my work is obviously really challenging,” she says. “My work really started not selling, and I saw the trend go toward much softer images. It’s been frustrating to see how the art world has been turned into this commercial craziness, and the lack of serious work has really bothered me.”

At the same time, photography was making a major shift from film to digital, and art galleries started showing photography that had been manipulated in Photoshop. After years of cultivating skills in a darkroom, “I was really at the point where I could say I’m a master printer,” Imboden says. “And then, suddenly, it all went away.” (She did eventually make the switch to digital in 2007. She says she realized “if I have a tool that will allow [my images to be] better and stronger, why wouldn’t I embrace that?”)

Instead of changing her aesthetic, Imboden stuck to what she knew and found an audience. She began taking her work to Asia and Europe more frequently, and found success there, particularly in Scandinavia. “She has really stayed true to her vision, as different types of photography have come in and out of vogue,” says Dwyer, who met Imboden during this time. “And she believes in it so thoroughly and so deeply that she has to continue [down] the path that she is on. That takes a lot of courage. It would be so easy to go with the current trend, which would be quickly sellable, or picked up easily for this or that show. That would be a compromise for her, and that’s not what she’s willing to do.”

Though she was traveling increasingly, she still used Baltimore as her home base. And she remained devoted to cultivating its next generation of artists. In 2008, Imboden helped create the annual Baker Artist Awards, which are named for her mother’s family and are some of the city’s most prestigious art prizes. She also focused on teaching—at workshops in places like Norway, France, and the Czech Republic, and at MICA (though she stopped teaching there two years ago and has focused more intently on her work).

One such workshop was in 2014, in the United Arab Emirates, an assignment that surprised Imboden at first. “Here I am a woman, a lesbian, invited to this place where they don’t exactly like women,” she says. “But what was so cool was I showed a slideshow of my work to the class, and they didn’t ask any questions, but they listened. And I got all the way through to the end and the class said, ‘Would you do that again?’ I felt like that was the deepest compliment anyone had ever given me.”

This became another example to her of how we are all connected, whether that is consciously or unconsciously.

“It led me to understand the power of art and the importance of art in our lives. How important it is to have this common language where we can begin to share really deep emotions that sometimes transcend words,” Imboden says. “Then, we can gain shared empathy and compassion, [which] connect us rather than pull us apart.”

Examples like this sometimes surprise her. She smiles, thinking of another time. “I was having some electrical work done, and an electrician walked by and stopped to look at my works. He said, ‘Did you do this?’ I said, ‘Yeah I did this.’ And he said, ‘Good to get that stuff out.’” Imboden laughs. “That kind of says it, doesn’t it?”

It’s a weekday afternoon, days after her Y:ART show’s installation, and Imboden sits on a stool in the upstairs of her studio. She directs her long-time assistant, Cory Donovan (who is a Baltimore magazine contributor), on the placement of mirror fragments, which are then attached to the larger Plexiglas mirror. Her instructions are quite detailed—creating art is often more technical than it seems. “Try it with the ragged edge going down. Now go that way,” she says, her fingers duplicating her directions. “Stop right there.”

She instructs me to sit behind her so I can see what she sees. Then, her long-time model Carl Stevens disrobes and sits on a bench in front of her. Imboden has grown fonder of the collaborative process, and appreciates the energy of Donovan, who became her assistant while a student at MICA, and Stevens, an actor who lives in Florida. Stevens will “come for a few weeks, and we do these binge shootings,” Imboden says. “We’ll shoot for four or five days in a row.”

“You do something, and we’ll work with it,” Imboden tells Stevens. So he rotates his shoulders to meet the mannequin, the reflection of which he sees in the mirror. “Put your hand on your hip,” Imboden directs him. After many adjustments, Imboden holds the camera to her face and the gentle pulse of the shutter sounds repeatedly.

This is the moment when she believes that she becomes a channel for the unconscious. When she’s shooting, “I like to react to things. There’s a level of exploration, and that’s when it becomes a much more intuitive process. I’m concentrating so much on what I’m looking at that I don’t really have time to think,” she says. “Plato said when artists create, they’re out of their minds. And my interpretation of that is they put their mind away, and they’re present. They can go deep within themselves, and perhaps deep into a greater mind.”

At one point during the shoot, Imboden leans really close to Stevens, almost as if she is going to perch above his shoulder. She then peeps through the camera’s viewfinder. “Oh God, you look like you have wings and you’re going to fly!” she exclaims. She holds the camera in one hand and places the other just above Stevens’ shoulder—and I watch the puppet become puppet master. “Now move your arm up a little bit,” she tells him, her own hand lifting at the same time as his. “A little bit more. Oh, this is so nice!”

A few minutes later, she stands up and suggests that we all take a look at the images. We head downstairs to her computer (which, ironically, sits by a sculpture that closely resembles a marionette). In some of the photos, Stevens’ head and torso are spliced on top of the mannequin and a soft glow around his shoulders gives him the slightest appearance of an archangel. One particular photograph has such a luminous, otherworldly quality that everyone in the room murmurs in delight.

I look at Imboden, and her face has a look of surprise and satisfaction, as if she realizes what she is seeing for the first time. She exclaims, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Being a parent in 2016 is incredible in many ways, but perhaps outshining them all is the access to smartphones. If my kid is sick, I can book a doctor’s appointment, add it to my calendar, text my husband to update him, and have medicine delivered to my door in an hour all while playing soothing music (which in Lou’s case is still, impossibly, “Hotline Bling”). The ability for one device to do all those things is amazing, but it is simply an embarrassment of riches that that same device can also take unlimited, professional-grade photos of my son.

I am in no way a trained photographer. I am simply a lady with a baby, an iPhone, and just enough free time to really dig deep into the vanity of documenting a child made partially in my likeness. Below are a few of my thoughts on the matter of photographing your kid. With the holidays approaching and cards to print and mail to family, frenemies, and coworkers, I thought it might be worth sharing some unsolicited advice.

Perspective

At a happy hour with a buddy of mine, we discovered our sons might not share the friendship we’ve enjoyed for over 20 years. Through tears of laughter, I got a shot of both their reactions to really seeing each other for the first time, and they’re among my favorite from Lou’s first year. Until these shots, I hadn’t considered capturing what Lou was reacting to, but now I make it a practice to include multiple vantage points—especially since most of the time it just means turning around.

Opportunity

The outtakes can be the best stuff. Each morning that Lou turned a month older, I’d photograph him in the same spot—a common practice, I know, but an effective one. This was taken at six months, when his life was dominated by learning to sit up and pointing his index finger. This picture tells you which skill he still needed to work on. As long as they’re safe and happy, snap a few more pictures once your intended shot is a bust. This image feels so incredibly Lou, and it made me step back from my Dina Lohan brand of crazy-mom photography and instead focus on capturing his silliness.

Reflection

Babies love their reflections. Mirrors are intoxicating to a young mind, but kind of terrible for picture taking, especially since there is a 100-percent chance I’ll be captured in the reflection looking crazy and covered in cat hair. Instead, keep an eye out for all the other remarkable places in which they find their reflection. Lou had recently learned to pull himself to standing when he was seduced by the glow of the dessert case at Marie Louise Bistro one night. We let him gaze in, and because it was way past his bedtime, I was able to get a shot flooded with light against a nice pool of darkness. The best shots I’ve taken of this kid are when he’s naturally drawn to something, even (or especially) when it’s his own face.

Pets

Since he came home from the hospital, Lou has loved and been loved by our cat Richard. They snuggle together, they chase each other around, and they often drink out of the same water bowl because I’m learning to pick my battles. I’ve probably taken 300 pictures of these buddies and this the only one that’s any good because they share a sixth sense that alerts them that I’m reaching for my phone. But, I’m not a quitter and I purchased more space in my Cloud, so after a few months of unusable flashes of white fur and baby rolls, I finally got this shot.

Simplicity

The best spot for Lou’s high chair happened to be against a dark wall in our living room, and it’s turned out to be a fantastic backdrop for pictures. If there’s a spot in your living or dining room that you particularly like—or even just a solid-colored wall—try moving your baby’s eating situation there. Babies are like drunk college students when they eat: the goal is to shovel it in quickly and without the irksome realities of polite society. And as parents, it’s our job to photograph the hell out of their messes and then pretend to be strict about better manners. Taking these pictures against a solid backdrop highlights your kid and has the added bonus of leaving out the clutter in the space behind you.

Negative Space

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume “negative space” means “any space without babies in it.” My initial instinct when photographing Lou was to get in close and document every curve of his sweet little face, but as he’s gotten older, I’ve pulled back the frame. Creating a sense of place gives you more reference points down the line because it’s hard to tell where the picture was taken if it’s entirely filled with baby face, cute as it might be.

Hey Mama!

Hello! You’re a lovely person who Russian-dolled herself for nine months and lived to tell the tale of human extraction, so get in the damn pictures with that baby. It’s really easy to forget to jump in the shot (and being sleep deprived and discovering pureed pear in your hair isn’t the most glamorous you’ve ever been), but your kid will one day look for your face in his arsenal of baby pictures and you should be in them. Sneaking a glass of wine during an unforeseen nap or conducting a feed on the ground of a parking lot won’t be the biggest moments in your lives, but there’s a sweetness in capturing the little stuff.

We’ve all been there. A server delivers our dishes to the table and, before we can dig in, one iPhone-wielding diner implores us to wait while they get the perfect shot, angle, and filter for every plate. And you know what? Experts say that’s okay. “We eat with our eyes,” says Dave Seel, founder of Blue Fork Marketing, which handles public relations for Gunther & Co. and Gnocco. “Visual content is quickly becoming a primary driver in the food industry.” We decided to survey a chef, a food blogger, and a marketing expert for their best tips on getting those picture-perfect food shots.

Zack Mills
(@zmills417)

executive chef, Wit & Wisdom

Lighting is Key
“It seems to be all about the lighting from what I’ve learned. I always try to make sure the light is natural and coming from the back of me.”

Aim For No Filter
“Ideally, I am trying to find the best lighting possible and try not to use any Instagram filters if I can. But I am partial to Ludwig.”

Always Look Back
“I like looking back over my Instagram account at a lot of the pictures of our food over the years. It is a nice yearbook of sorts, and helps me remember what to improve on.”

Rachel Lipton (@LiketheteaEATS)

food blogger, Like The Tea Eats

Right Tools
“I usually travel with a portable lighting device that I use when it’s dark. I also have a mini tripod for my phone to keep it steady. The app Enlight is great for editing.”

Quick Captions
“If it’s more than 90 characters, people lose interest. I get the name of the food item in there and the restaurant in the first five words.”

Backdrop Matters
“Make sure there is little to no clutter in the background of your photo. No one wants to see your dirty spoon. I do my best to eat dinner outside and, if I’m lucky enough, to have a water view.”

Dave Seel (@thefoodadventurer)

founder, Blue Fork Marketing

The Editing Room
“I try to avoid using a filter, but I generally edit my shots. I bump up my brightness level. Look at Bon Appétit and Saveur—that’s what they do.”

The Right Angle
“Go low and close, with the phone at the edge of the table, to bring out the juiciness of a burger or the crust on a scallop.”

Story Time
“Instagram Stories are the next big thing. You have to be a director and screenwriter all at once, but also keep it real, have fun with it, and make it interesting for your audience.”

As he looks through his photographs, Jay Fleming becomes an encyclopedia of the Chesapeake Bay. He talks about the weight of a pound net teeming with rockfish, or the life cycle of a blue crab, shedding its shell. He throws out names you’ve never heard before, let alone associated with our waters—sugar toads, ribbonfish—and remembers every weathered waterman he has met along the way.

“There’s a lot more to the bay than crabs, oysters, and rockfish,” he says. “Spend enough time swimming around the grass beds and you’ll be amazed at what you can find.”

Fleming, 29, is flipping through the pages of his first book, Working the Water, a visual narrative of our state estuary, but his story goes back even further, to his childhood in Annapolis, where he inherited a love for photography and the outdoors from his father, Kevin, then a National Geographic photographer. From an early age, with his dad’s hand-me-down Nikon, Fleming created his own aesthetic, heading out on nearby waters with little more than a kayak and film.

By the time he reached his 20s, after stints at the Department of Natural Resources and Yellowstone National Park, Fleming decided to pursue photography full-time, focusing his lens on the majestic waterway where he grew up. From winter through summer, he explored its characters and creatures, waking as early as 2 a.m. to travel all over the bay—by buyboat, clam rig, skipjack, even his own trusty kayak—snapping everything from fish and crustaceans to bivalves and turtles in Maryland and Virginia. Beyond the wildlife, Fleming endeavored to document the culture of Chesapeake watermen and their communities.

“Some were apprehensive at first,” he says with a smile. “But now those same people have become great friends.”

After three years, Fleming’s 280-page coffee-table book hits shelves this month, filled with poignant portraits and a breathtaking snapshot of life on the bay.

“If I had more time, I could have done even more,” he says. “The more I went out, the more I learned, and the more I realized how many people still make a living off the water. I saw how the industry was aging and how many people who were passing away had seen parts of the bay and its culture that we’ll never see again. That has motivated me to keep taking pictures.”

Wow two days is not a lot of time to orchestrate 28 photo shoots.
Lou had just incredibly planned the whole thing out. We did 12 shoots in four hours that first day. We did 16 the next. I work pretty fast usually, but nothing ever like this. It was 15 minutes per guy, boom, onto the next. We were able to do some in the studio, but Lou also picked a few locations, like under Sixteen Tons, where I was surprised to learn there’s a moped repair shop. Some were in the back alley behind Howl pet store. We did some in people’s offices, also K&S Auto Repair on Falls Road. There was sort of a vehicle theme that emerged.

What were some of the most memorable shoots?
The very first shot of the whole project was on the roof of Twenty20 Cycling with owner Johnny May. As soon as I got there, I’m immediately climbing a ladder onto a roof, where Johnny is wearing a robe and they’re hoisting a bike on top. But that was such an amazing shot and great way to start it off. I thought, ‘If anything else comes close to this shot, we’re good.’ That was sort of the lightbulb picture.

Did different subjects have different levels of comfort?
Totally. Mr. Ming, the owner of Asian Taste, just cracked me up because he was so immediately on board with it. This picture was the last one of the day and there was no time to really get him warmed up. But he didn’t need it, it just clicked really fast. Other people were a bit more reserved, which I totally understand. Everyone has different levels of comfortability. It became more what are you willing to do and what are you willing not to do. Chef Bernard’s picture is ridiculous. He’s wearing a pink skirt on his mini-bike on top of the bar. He went all out. For the most part, I’d say people were willing to take it to the PG-13 level.

Speaking of PG-13, there are two versions of the calendars—one standard and one “boys gone wild.”
Well Lou initially threw the idea out to a few people, thinking maybe 10 or so would be interested. But, as word spread, we were able to confirm 28 people. Obviously that is too many for one calendar year, so we needed to make two. The general rule became: If you don’t have a shirt on, you’re in the “boys gold wild” version.

I know you said Burt was a big inspiration for the photos. Anything else you were channeling?
I sort of wanted the photos to look paparazzi-esque. We were moving so fast, it was kind of like, ‘Put the lights here. Okay, that looks good.’ But you get all these really cool highlights on the sides of people’s faces in a couple of shots. It helped that we had two beautiful, sunny days . . . I’m usually a pretty quiet shooter, like I’m kind of just there observing, not really dictating. But I was so on board directing these shots, telling them, ‘Open your shirt, move your leg.’ I’ve found that even in my assignments since the calendar, I’m a bit more pushy, a bit more directorial. It’s funny how it’s changed my style a bit.

Are you happy with how it turned out?
Oh yeah. It was just such a clever idea and it turned out really well. I think anyone that lives in Baltimore can appreciate it. I’ve heard they have even sold a couple internationally already. It’s funny how it’s sort of snowballing. Now I know if I ever want to get anything done, I’m going to get Lou involved because he makes it happen. It’s definitely a credit to him and everyone in the photographs, who were willing to put themselves out there.

The calendars are available at various businesses on The Avenue and online. There is a release party on November 12 at Atomic Books, which will feature some talks and behind-the-scenes footage. Rumor has it that a female version is in the works for 2017.