© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum
“People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere,” says Devin Allen, a 27-year-old amateur photographer whose pictures of the Baltimore uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in April of this year became iconic of the Black Liberation Movement born again.
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The photographs, which began as a viral sensation, made it to the cover of Time Magazine, making Allen only the third amateur photographer to do so. Allen, a Baltimore native, grew up just five minutes away from the site of Freddie Gray’s fatal encounter with local police on April 12.
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Allen photographed the uprising, which began April 18, and continued over the course of ten days. With an ongoing cycle of protests, arrests, and injuries, the tension increased until it reached the breaking point when the police refused high school students access to public transportation, preventing them from going home. Violence erupted, with police cars destroyed and a CVS Pharmacy burned and looted. A state of emergency was declared and the National Guard was sent in—but when it was all over, it was the people of Baltimore who came together to clean up the streets, maintaining the unity that they had created throughout the month.
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In Allen’s eyes, the Baltimore uprising created, “Unity and love. In my city, that’s rare. People have difficulties. But we all united in one goal. We have to keep that up. We united for the protest, and once it stops, what do you do then? We love one another. There are multiple ways to fight. You can’t fix other issues if your home is not straight. I am a true activist for my city.”
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Indeed, Allen has partnered with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, for the first solo show of his photographs titled Devin Allen: New Awakenings, In a New Light, now on view through December 7, in a new community space inside the museum called Lewis Now. The exhibition is free to the public, and has been designed to have interactive components. A number of the images have been enlarged to 20-feet wide and have been wheat pasted onto the wall by Allen, in a nod to the street origins of the images. Visitors can also write responses to the prompt, “Where were you?” on a timeline that shows a number of the events Allen captured in the photographs.
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© Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/897723-exhibit-devin-allen-awakenings-new-light#HCRoIrR5UIJy23Lw.99