"In order to understand a place, we need not take root but be uprooted...to drill down into [it] and

observe [it] in a new manner, finally make [it] our own."

-Andrea Zanzotto

Seeing Baltimore in a new way. Reanalyzing a sense of place. In moments, quick

flashes but placing it in the realm of larger things and ideas is the way of the Secret City series.

In the 70s and 80s, Italian photographers Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, and Ugo Mulas, of whom

I’ve looked to for this series, taught that we need not leave our home spaces to explore, to have

an adventure, to observe what most people choose, or unconsciously ignore. To take symbols,

in their cases the cliche Italian tourist icons, and reinterpret them. Make us see them in a new

way.

Their simple, often kind, but decisive photos are at the root of this series. How could I

"re-see" the city I've lived and photographed in for over two decades, mostly in black and white?

How could I retrain the eye to see the small details others miss as they drive east to west and

north to south? How could I make it permanent and not fleeting? The choice to use film fulfilled

that last question. The seconds "etched" on small squares of silver couldn't be erased. Ghirri, a

prolific essayist, wrote that photographs are capable of "displacing the gaze, opening up the

landscape."

I walk around the city thinking inside all of us is a secret city, one that only we know and

live in in our minds.

One can't possibly ignore the economic disparity that plagues Baltimore, but you can see

it in a different way. When I take a picture of say, a man I met sitting in front of a Dollar General

in his wheelchair that reads "drive"I don't see the connection to a frame full of jewelry and a blond 70s model smiling from

an ad found on top of a historical document (on vikings no less in the soon-to-be gentrified

Westside) titled The Plague. The man in the wheelchair was kind, by the way, and so was the

jewelry seller. Both willing to let me take their pictures. Individually, they were just photos I took

walking around the city. But put together, they make clear to me a strong point about our city.

An almost blood red prayer rug drapes down the dashboard of an old car. A ripe, split

watermelon at the summer farmers market. Individually they are those things, next to each

other? They work together, almost, in secret.

My on-going documentation of Baltimore's communities along the "chemical coast" and how it affect the residents who live there. Coal, chemicals, animal rendering and tox waste dumps are all part of the area that makes up Baltimore's southern tip. It's a mixed media project using digital the and 35mm analog film. It's a goal to create a book from the project and exhibit the work in the community and call attention to the health and living issues in those areas.