#BlackPowerMatters in West Baltimore

#BLACKPOWERMATTERS both contextualizes the rage and violence of the riots that rocked Baltimore in the Spring of 2015, and celebrates the agency of a community resisting against all the odds.

On the 19th of April, 2015, Freddie Gray died in his hospital bed from injuries he’d sustained during his arrest by the Baltimore Police Department. Public outcry against police brutality boiled over into a week of protests that ended in riots and the deployment of the National Guard.

Baltimore is a living laboratory for what author Michelle Alexander coined the New Jim Crow, “a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” Less than 50% of the residents of Sandtown-Winchester (Freddie Gray’s neighborhood) are employed, and with more than 450 of its 14,000 residents in the “system”, the neighborhood is the most incarcerated community in Baltimore.

Much of the national media’s coverage of the riots recreated the visual narrative of the New Jim Crow. Pundits spoke shallowly of poverty, and racial inequality, while photographers and camera men captured money shots of poor, angry, black youth loot- ing pharmacies and liquor stores.

The uprising was portrayed as arbitrary, without direction, and spontaneous. The community’s agency was robbed by a narrative that either portrayed them as victims or criminals. The years of abandon by government officials, a nonexistent economy, and constant police harassment was trivialized by an increasingly click-bait-driven national press. The decades of organizing and movement building that helped set the tone of the protests, and has continued since, was lost in the soundbites and media drama.

For the last year I have focused on creating a visual narrative that celebrates the agency that was robbed by the New Jim Crow, and contextualizes the rage expressed in the streets of Baltimore. The project has focused on subjects that have been working to better their communities both before and after Freddie’s death. These residents are continuing the Civil Rights struggle. To contextualize these images of agency, I have also been photographing landscapes of abandoned factories, boarded-up homes, and the addresses of homicide scenes. These spaces are symbolic of the loss of agency. For me, they are more powerful representations of marginalization than pictures of impoverished African Americans being poor.