Beautiful Ghetto
On April 18, 2015, the city of Baltimore erupted in mass protests in response to the brutal murder of Freddie Gray by police. Devin Allen was there, and his iconic photos of the Baltimore uprising became a viral sensation.
In these stunning photographs, Allen documents the uprising as he strives to capture the life of his city and the people who live there. Each photo reveals the personality, beauty, and spirit of Baltimore and its people, as his camera complicates popular ideas about the "ghetto."
Allen's camera finds hope and beauty doing battle against a system that sows desperation and fear, and above all, resistance, to the unrelenting pressures of racism and poverty in a twenty-first-century American city.
Devin Allen was born and raised in West Baltimore. He gained national attention when his photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time in May 2015 -- only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had been featured. His photographs have also appeared in New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Aperture, and in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and the winner of the 2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship.