Oh Baltimore

The Wire is finally back on HBO On Demand. I am not a television watcher, I dont know whats on at 9:30 on Tuesday night, but I am obsessed with The Wire, and really it isnt a television show, it's crack. Anyone who knows me, knows not to get me started on how brilliant this show is because I will sit there and blah blah blah your ear off. The show was my primary influence for traveling to Baltimore this summer and making some photographs. I had to see things for myself. I also heard that they were filming the fifth and supposedly last season of the show, this season's theme will be the media, I'm fiending. I had never been to Baltimore before. Here are some out takes of what I found, the rest can be found in my new series All My Life I Have Had The Same Dream.






Looking through old notebooks and journals, I came accross this:
Spending several days exploring and driving around the inner city ghettos of Baltimore has really drained me. The sadness, pain, desperation, the rotting, the violence, crime, drugs, survival, the limited resources, the seemingly non-existent options and choices, no future, the hopelessness... It is something incredibly hard to experience and even harder to swallow that our country allows its own people to live this way, and that we as voters and citizens choose to do nothing about it except look the other way. It is also hard to make photographs here day after day. I have let several photographs go. I just couldnt do it. I left them there. The sadness and desperation at times were just too overwhelming and unbearable. Part of the process for me is letting it all in and soaking it up and I only had so much in me. It is one thing to feel it and another to photograph it.

Creator and executive producer of The Wire, David Simon, said:
"The American obsession with police procedural and crime drama usually only allows for villains - in large part, black and brown - who exist as foils, to be pursued and destroyed by cop heroes. We're addressing ourselves to where the 'villains' actually come from, and whether we have any right to regard them as somehow less human than the rest of us."