The novelist Joan Didion once wrote that "a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it."
Photographer Shawn Baron has spent the last five years of his creative life rendering and remembering Baltimore with such obsessive love that his portfolio of local urban landscapes is hard to challenge as a complete and honest picture of this city. The second installment of When a House was a Home ... Reflections of Baltimore City, Baron's homage to his hometown which began last Spring, is on display at Passion Fish Gallery in Hampden until March 6.
Forty-one of his black-and-white prints of houses, industrial sites, commercial facades, and Baltimore landmarks tell a tale of the forgotten parts of Baltimore neighborhoods. "They capture the soul of the place," says Baron. These scenes "are part of the old city, the old stories" that made up what he knew as the "good old days". This is Baltimore as he remembers it and as his grandparents told it to him.
Baron bounced from one inner-city neighborhood to another when he was growing up, making his home in Parkville, Highlandtown, and West Baltimore, among other neighborhoods, before settling in Hampden when he was 13. His mother owns Passion Fish, a cluttered art gallery on 36th Street near Falls Road, full of tacky jewelry and faded souvenirs. Just being in the gallery makes it seem as if Baron's family so loved the "good old days" that they saved up all of its scraps and are selling it piece by piece in their store.
The photographs are a bit different. They do not exude the same sort of nostalgia as the trinkets behind the gallery's picture windows do. They are very professional, but surprisingly warm works of architectural and urban landscape photography. Each one, insists Baron, is a record of a space that is connected with real people who once lived or maybe still do live and thrive on the vibrancy of the city.
Some of the images, like "Hanover Street Bridge," a straightforward portrait of an elegantly-designed bridge, show landmarks that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. "I've had two relatives who have died on that bridge," says Baron. "It's a part of my history and a part of Baltimore history.
Other shots pay tribute to lifestyles that have slipped into the past. "Crossing The Tracks" shows an old mill from afar, with a half-dozen train tracks winding towards it. From where we see the scene, it is hard to tell that the tracks end at about the point where we stand, and that they have fallen into disuse.
"There is a reason why there used to be train tracks there," says Baron. "People used to depend on these industries as a way of life ... When those places closed down, and entire generation of people and their children lost their jobs and their livelihood ... And to me, it's worth it to hold onto it."
Other photos are more explicit in their commentary. "Starting from the $500's" shows a decrepit, vegetation-covered remnant of an old house in Woodberry, near the old mills. This area, says Baron, is now being built by big development companies into $500,000 condos.
"People come to Hampden and they see this fun little neighborhood where they can do their shopping and leave ... and that's cool and all, but they look at the people who live here and who have been here a long time with disgust. When those mills closed down -- that's why there are junkies on the corners here ... why there are so many kids raised by single moms ... because the fathers ran off because it hurt their pride not to be able to look after their families...You can't understand a place without understanding its history."
Other parts of the exhibit are more lighthearted -- they deal with the mystery and intrigue of Baron's own childhood memories. "Dunes," a shot of an old industrial park with mountains of gravel, looks eerie and wild. "Being there is like being on the moon or something," Baron recalls, as if remembering a great childhood playground.
"Laboratory" shows the chipped-paint fa??ade of an early 20th-century style building with the words "Chemical Lab" stenciled on the storefront. The idea that a building that is today so washed-out and hopeless-looking could have once been a laboratory is both ridiculous and familiar to Baron. In the good old days, more was possible, and his childhood impression of a maniacal chemist in a labcoat conducting experiments behind an old-school Baltimore drug counter is lasting.
Sometimes Baron captures the inherent irony of many of Baltimore's old places. So many elegant facades and grand neighborhoods are deserted and left to decay. How did they get this way? Did time simply move too fast for these neighborhoods, leaving them unable to adapt to the sudden flight of the city's industry and population?
"Escape Plan?" shows a stately old brick building which could have been alternately a warehouse or a tenement house, with an old advertising billboard on top that reads, "Fire Prevention Week: Do You Have an Escape Plan?" Below the sign, the windows are boarded up and speckled with graffiti. If the fire code didn't provide one, the people of the neighborhood sure found a way to get out to safety.
Baron's photos come together in a kind of poetry that expresses, in the end, a vision of Baltimore that is both bittersweet and hopeful. He may not cover every neighborhood in the city, but his show has a kind of completeness to it. It reveals this city as a place where it is worth remembering a past that is slipping away, or as Baron puts it, "a part of social history that's just going to get pushed over."
And he wants to protect it, not just in the name of history, but because these are his memories, and this is his town. "My family worked for those industries that have long since gone away. If Bethlehem Steel were still around, that's probably where I'd be working," he says.
"Maybe I take photos because it's genetic. After breathing all that asbestos and dust for so many years, I have to do it, because it's who I am."
"When a House was a Home ... Reflections on Baltimore City: II" will be on display at Passion Fish Gallery, 1129 W. 36th St., until March 6. The gallery is free and it is closed Monday and Tuesday. Call (410) 925-4133.
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