Devin Allen: Baltimore gathers a sustained account of the photographer’s hometown at a moment when the city became a national symbol of racial injustice and resistance. Allen first reached a broad public in 2015, when his photograph of the Baltimore uprising following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody appeared on the cover of Time. This book expands far beyond that defining image, bringing together photographs made from 2015 to 2023 across streets, demonstrations, and private encounters.

Allen photographs from within the community in which he was born and raised. Formal portraits appear beside protest images and observations of everyday city life, shifting attention between collective action and individual presence. Many photographs were made collaboratively with their subjects, an approach that complicates the detached authority often associated with documentary practice. The resulting portrait of Black Baltimore admits pride, vulnerability, tension, and contradiction without reducing the city to a single political event.

Published by Steidl, the 200-page volume includes more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished. Allen conceived the work as a personal narrative about the shared texture of his community. Essays by Darnell L. Moore, Salamishah Tillet, and D. Watkins extend that perspective, offering insight into his working process and placing the images within Baltimore’s history rather than treating them as isolated news photographs.

The book received the 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize. For a serious collection, its importance lies not in that distinction alone, but in the concentration of eight years of work into a coherent statement by a photographer closely connected to his subject. It records a consequential period while also questioning who is permitted to represent Black life—and how resistance, kinship, and ordinary experience can coexist within the same photographic account.