On Wednesday night, I had the honor of photographing a very special edition of West Wednesday—its 611th gathering—hosted by Baltimore Beat at Red Emma’s.
The panel was titled “Looking Back. Moving Forward”, and it marked 10 years since the death of Freddie Gray and the 2015 Uprising that followed. The evening served as both reflection and rallying cry—a chance to grieve, to remember, and to imagine what justice can still look like in our city.
The Panelists
The conversation was led by some of Baltimore’s most powerful voices:
Tawanda Jones – Activist, sister of Tyrone West (killed by Baltimore Police in 2013), and the driving force behind West Wednesdays
Devin Allen – Award-winning photographer whose images from 2015 made national headlines
Lisa Snowden – Editor-in-chief of Baltimore Beat
Lawrence Grandpre – Author and Director of Research at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
Eze Jackson – Musician, moderator, and one of the city’s strongest community voices
Each of them brought truth, vulnerability, and a fierce clarity to the conversation.
Timothy Caughman, a Black man, was slain in New York City by a white supremacist from Baltimore. Two communities gather to honour Caughman in very different ways.
I went out to take pictures.
People gather to remember in Hampden (where the white supremacist murderer lived) to remember Timothy Caughman.
On the tail end of the original Baltimore Ceasefire weekend, a man is killed in West Baltimore
During the reading of the names at the end of the Baltimore Ceasefire weekend, Barry Lee’s name was the last to be read. His mother requested we attend his vigil in West Baltimore.
We later discovered he had been out to Cease Fire events.
We gather, slowly, a combination of family and Baltimore Ceasefire members to remember Barry Lee.
More family arrive for the vigil, spelling out Barry Lee’s name in candles.
Took the day to drive down to Alexandria, to work on the Bloomery branding project. Erik asked me to help out with building them a new look for a product line from a distillery out in West Virginia.
Of course, this was the day that it had to pour icy rain, so the roads were just clogged. I managed to skirt a lot of it with Waze, but I was still about a half an hour late. Everyone was happy to see me, though I felt out of touch. Work was buzzing, but I am completely out of it save for this solitary project. I’m glad Zerflin has been doing well, because otherwise we’d really be struggling. The work that we’ve had come in from A2L, Bainbridge, and The History Factory have kept us busy while Brightline works on landing more projects.
I settled in at Kristen’s old desk, she was a developer that moved on to another job.
The work was fairly simple; just reviewing Moodboards with Kuntz (Moodboards are essentially collages of images that we use for inspiration for the branding and logo), and then editing them. My laptop was mind-numbingly slow, though. The files were small, the operations quick, but
Dropbox is still pretty awesome, though. If you’re not using it, you ought to be… Image via CrunchBase
Dropbox chose that moment to sync with everything in the world, and so my work ground to a halt. What was only supposed to be a couple hours ended up being the entire day; I didn’t finish up the last round of edits until around 5pm.
Erik was positive, and even asked me about how the family was doing and inquired if I was receiving checks ok, which was really nice. Not all of our clients pay us in a very timely fashion, which is really difficult, but Erik has really been helping.
While I’d been waiting for the computer to kick in, I had been doing art venue research in Alexandria. I’ve already identified at least 25 different coffeehouses and galleries in Baltimore that I might be able to show art at. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I decided to swing by Firehook Bakery to get a chai and a croissant, and see if I could talk to the owner. I met with a Tunisian barista who was very friendly, and told me to call in the morning, because he and the manager would be working together then. He was really nice. I jabbered away with him in French; happy to be able to exercise my rusty language skills.
The ride home was even worse than the ride down, compounding my frustration. I had hoped to be in and our quickly so that I could get more Zerflin work done. Several of the Bainbridge sites were so close to being done… But it only got worse. I had a cheque to deposit into our Zerflin account, but even after trying 6 ATMs and consulting with a friendly Spanish furniture worker who was able to deposit his cheque, I wasn’t able to. Finally, with the help of the furniture worker I found a Capital One branch that was still open, and I stormed in two minutes before they locked their doors.
My Nemesis, the ATM.
Yup. Definitely not Capitol One. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The man behind the counter patiently explained to me that no, I was not able to deposit money into my Capital One account with my USAA card… I had switched them in my wallet and had been using the wrong card in vain the entire time… Mortified as I was, the teller was very kind and helped me get my check deposit.
Having burned through no less than 8 podcasts on the trip, I picked up Chinese food at the Double Dragon and made it home.
Tamika was exhausted. She’d been working on a new coding project that she had taken on, and was worn out. We chilled for a bit and watched Key & Peele before diving back into work. I managed to get everything done I needed to, but I’m exhausted. And guess what time it is… 2AM…
Click on the image, then give it a minute to load. It’s worth it.
I set my camera (a Canon 20D) to the Delay setting (you know, the one you use when you want to do a family photo with you in it), and placed it on a tripod.
Then, every time I walked by it, I hit the shutter.
I saved all the images, opened them as frames Adobe ImageReady, and exported it as a gif.
It was as if they beckoned me, those windows.
We were in the far end of Union Station, across from where the rest of the staff from the National Fatherhood Initiative’s Golden Dads crew sat in the Thunder Grill. They wanted to sit and chat, and I was restless.
And the windows, they called to me.
There was something about the design, the pattern of the glass. It reminded me of the Frank Lloyd Wright wing at the Philadelphia Art Museum. I would spend hours at a time there, just sitting and looking at everything.
And that’s what I did here. Oddly enough, some sort of art exhibition was being shown on the floor. It was empty. Not a single person in the hustle of catching their train or towing a family out into the Capital that was interested in admiring a few paintings.
I lay down on the marbled floors of the chamber and aimed my lens at the ceiling.
In our backyard we have a huge 8 foot stump. The tree it belonged to originally fell on the house before we bought it (the owner made the repairs). The owner then had most of the tree cut down and carted away, save for this massive stump about 3 feet in diameter.
Our Yard (in blue)
Our house is a town house, and the yard out back is relatively narrow; the same width as the house (though we actually own an additional acre or two beyond it). The stump stands right at the far end of the yard, right smack dab in the middle. Cornering the edges of the yard closest to our house are two smaller trees. These trees are much skinnier, but quite tall… And instead of growing straight up, they each arc over our neighbors houses to the left and right.
I had ties some ropes to the young trees and anchored them around the stump in an effort to pull them away from the neighbors houses.
It worked quite well for a while, but then last month a set of harsh storms hit our area and pulled the stump out of the ground! I was incredulous! I didn’t think that stump was ever going to move…
So now this stump (a log, really) is lying lenghtwise in the middle of our yard, and has flattened what’s left of the old iron fence that was there with it.
The tow rope I had put around the stump to help bend the young trees is still on it, so yesterday I drove our Subaru back there to see if I could pull it. After 45 minutes, lots of rope, the neighbors’ hoist chain and a tying and untying knots, it was pretty apparent it wasn’t going to move. The stump weighed nearly as much as the Subaru!
