The Passionfish Gallery, an empty storefront on the Avenue in Hampden until co-owners Shawn Baron and his mother, Sandie Castle, resurrected it in late 2003, now finds itself host to a photography exhibit that chronicles the corrosion of once-vibrant neighborhoods and buildings not unlike its former self.
"When a House Was a Home...Reflections of Baltimore City" is a collection of 30 black and white images of decay taken by the same person who remodeled the gallery they hang in with his own bare hands. That is, Shawn Baron himself.
Looking at the stark images, one gets the sense that if he got the chance, Baron, born and raised in Baltimore, would resurrect, remodel and renovate as many of the crumbling facades of the beloved hometown depicted in his photos as he could.
Equal parts documentary and ode, "Reflections" strikes a balance between casting a nostalgic look backwards toward what Baltimore once was and loving the remnants of once-glorious neighborhoods for what they are today. As Baron writes in his artist statement,
"The beauty in these structures as they are, or were, when I found them or saw them growing up is just as important as ever. I do not document these images to exploit or testify to the deterioration of this city, but to show the simplest beauty in it."
Indeed, his camera finds beauty in dilapidated buildings and bitter-sweetness in faded storefront signs that herald now-abandoned businesses. His affection for the sort of non-traditionally beautiful images that figure so heavily into the cityscapes he displays -- rusted cables, weeded lots, fissured concrete -- is explained by his fierce hometown pride. They are the kind of portraits that only a native son could truly love and cherish.
"Portrait" seems like the right word thanks to Baron's tender treatment of his subject matter. In a photographic display devoid of the human figure, the city of Baltimore transcends the ghost town it first appears to be and becomes its own living and breathing character; the only living thing in the landscape, it would seem, other than Baron himself.
This, too, is fitting since certainly the problems that Baron grapples with in his work are of human, not civic, affairs. The types of images he chooses to include are filled with a desperate yearning to prolong life, to avoid the inevitable and to attain the immortal.
In Baron's work, Baltimore appears as an array of dizzy, crooked angles and badly constructed buildings that seem all the more fragile for the oblique perspectives from which they are approached. "Walk to Work, West Baltimore" is a good example of this signature composition. The low vantage point and sharp angle from which the photograph is taken, looking up a street from the bottom of a hill toward the dark, and ominous figure of a building in the distance, produces an uneasy feeling in the viewer.
The sense of fear produced by pieces like this one contributes to a very childlike sensibility in the amassed collection of Baron's photographs. The empty cityscapes imbue the collection with a child's awareness of feeling very small and lost in any place he goes. Each shot of an empty movie theater ("Mayfair Theater") or boarded-up house ("Old Town") is the earnest query of a curious child who wants to know why.
"In my years growing up in the city, I always wondered about what had happened to it. Where did all the stores go? Where did all the people move to, that had lived in the empty houses, the neighborhoods, the city? How did the buildings, the factories, the theaters, the department stores, come to sit empty?" says Baron.
His photographs ask all these questions and more but what is most touching about them is that he is able to retain his childlike sense of attachment to the city of his youth, despite its being abandoned by -- as would appear from his photographs -- almost everyone else.
Repetition is a tool put to good use in Baron's work. Although sometimes his subject matter seems slightly clich??, such as the full-on shot of a city bench branded with the infamous lofty claim, "Baltimore: The Greatest City in America" which Baron entitles "Propaganda," overall he does an expert job of editing the content of the show. It manages to utilize the repetition of blocks of rowhouses, vacant lots, and barren streets over and over again without tiring them out. Instead, these images become conventions of the show's desolate city theme and establish a strong sense of place.
Baron hammers home the endlessness of blight with the inherent nature of the subjects he chooses. His treatment of the graphic symmetry of a containment unit ("Containment Unit") recalls a Charles Sheeler-esque post-industrial modernism and makes the bleak, hard, geometry of the building seem to go on forever.
Yet Baron's work is not devoid of hope. The city of his photographs may lie in decay, but there is reason to believe that it will rise from the ashes.
"Baltimore is one of the last places to experience any sort of 'Renaissance' in the way of new building and rehabilitating the city and its neighborhoods," says Baron. And although he may not be able to crowd the Bethlehem Steel factory with workers and fill the empty grain silos of Locust Point himself, Baron's resurrection of just one empty building, the Passionfish Gallery, provides all of these lost landmarks with a place from which to restore themselves by themselves, giving them a chance to live on in the collective memory of all who see their haunting images.
"When a House Was a Home...Reflections of Baltimore City" runs until Sunday, Feb. 29 at the Passionfish Gallery located at 1129 W. 36 St., (410) 925-4133.
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