Devin Allen: Baltimore

A photobook chronicling the past decade of Baltimore’s Black community and their fight for racial justice, through the lens of a local

Devin Allen rose to prominence in 2015, when his photograph of the Baltimore uprising that followed the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police was published on the cover of Time magazine. Since then, Allen has continued to photograph the fight for social justice in his hometown of Baltimore, creating work that is not only a tribute to Black resistance but also a celebration of his community. His decade-long body of work serves as more than documentation—it confronts myths and casts into relief that which has been made invisible.
This book, awarded the 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize, includes more than 100 of Allen’s photographs, spanning 2015 to 2023, many of them never published before. Conceived as a personal narrative about what Allen has called “the texture of us,” the book encompasses formal portraits, images of protests and street scenes. These images are presented alongside texts by writers and activists Darnell L. Moore, Salamishah Tillet and D. Watkins that provide insight into Allen’s process and situate his work within the history of Baltimore.
Devin Allen (born 1988) is a self-taught artist, born and raised in West Baltimore. Allen was awarded the first Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art in 2017. That same year, he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for his book A Beautiful Ghetto. His photographs have been published in New York Magazine, the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post.