When the uprisings over the death of Freddie Gray began in Baltimore, many artists also rose up. Doing more traditional photographic work was somewhat outside my brand, but it seemed appropriate that for my participation with the Baltimore City protests I focus on photographing people. My photograph "Art for Peace" was included in the Full Circle Gallery Civil Protest and Demonstration Exhibition in June of 2015. It also lead to an invitation to show my work at the cultural arts stage of the Collective Minds house music festival, September 2015.

When artists Charles Cooper and Tracy Stevens invited me join artists making art in public as a way to continue the protests, I couldn't say no. From May through September, we staged monthly gatherings of artists in front of Penn Station. While others painted, drew in sketchbooks, and made music, I found myself with my camera in a city environment without my usual nature backdrops and the ability to keep manmade objects out of frame. It turned into an opportunity to prove that I can in fact produce good photographic work, not just photo illustration work. The new photographic work has spawned some concepts I will use in the future.

I have always believed that a connection to nature and giving everyone easy access to green spaces and natural foods, would relieve a lot of the tensions, unhappiness, and the breakdown of community life we see in the modern world. Humans are social animals, and that when we stray too far from that identity, we lose the interconnectedness that makes us function as individuals and as a society.

Only we haven't really strayed. Modern society forces us to lose that human/social animal identity by removing us from our natural environment. It traps us in expanses of brick and concrete, food deserts, office cubicles, and congested highways--and we all suffer because of it. One cannot help but think of John B. Calhoun's "behavioral sink" experiments in the mid 20th century. As we have less and less contact with nature, we have less understanding of it, and no longer care that it is being destroyed. We no longer care about each other. We are too busy struggling to survive in our new unnatural environment.

So, during summer of 2015, in addition to wrapping up shooting for Fairies of the Fields I was focused on creating photographs that celebrated art, joy, equality and diversity in Baltimore. Most of the street photography I produced featured artists participating in the Peace of Art gatherings. Sometimes I snapped photos of passers by. I did this at each monthly gathering from May through September. At the final September Peace of Art gathering, I created over 20 candid portraits in two hours, a truly interesting challenge for a nature photographer.

In the future, I will do a project that involves photo illustrations of people. I would like to try including candid street photographs in my nature-based photo illustration to see how our ideas about the person in the candid photo--their expression, what we perceive they are thinking about, the stories behind the details of their physical appearance--change when their surroundings are changed from urban to natural.

As is my usual practice, for my photography produced this summer I call on the past to better understand the present. History repeats itself, and in this case my choice of processing calls to mind those who fought for freedom and equality decades ago. That struggle is not over.