2 May 29 , 2022
Opening Lines
Photography saved Devin Allen’s life.
Now he’s teaching Baltimore students.
by Carita Rizzo
viral. Days later, the photo of a young Black man
running down the street with police in riot gear on his
heels made the cover of Time magazine, making Allen
only the third amateur photographer to have his work
featured on the publication’s cover.
Opportunities followed for Allen, then in his mid-
20s. In 2017, he became the first fellow of the Gordon
Parks Foundation, which recognized Allen’s
dedication to social justice through art, placing him in
proximity of the ground-breaking Black
photographer whose photojournalism of civil rights
issues, poverty and the African American experience
inspired generations of artists. Allen’s first book, “A
Beautiful Ghetto,” was released that same year. In
2020, he made the Time cover again, this time with a
photograph from a Black Trans Lives Matter protest.
His second book, “No Justice, No Peace: From the
Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter,” comes
out in October.
“There’s documentary photography, but then
there’s documentary photography that has this trust
and humanitarian aspects to it,” Peter Kunhardt Jr.,
executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation,
told me. “I’ve seen so many pictures of protests and
rallies and marches, especially in the wake of George
Floyd. What stuck out for me around Devin’s work is
the humanity in the subjects’ faces.
“It reminds me so much of Parks’s work when he
was photographing the Nation of Islam, and the
Malcolm X work, and his work with the March on
Washington around civil rights. I saw so many
parallels to images that he had. He captured that sameHis Focus Is on
Helping Youth
W
hen Devin Allen comes to talk to
students in inner-city schools,
there are few kids who believe one
of Baltimore’s most prominent
photographers hails from theirneighborhood. “They’re like, ‘Ain’t no way this guy did
all this stuff, and he’s from West Baltimore,’ ” says
Allen. “As soon as I open my mouth, they’re like,
‘Yeah, you from here.’ ”
It is not just Baltimore’s youth that is surprised by
Allen’s overnight success. The self-taught
photographer’s career trajectory changed
dramatically in 2015, when a picture he took during
the Baltimore Uprising — a series of protests in
response to the arrest and consequent death of 25-
year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody — went