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 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 same essence in humanity in the subject matter,” Kunhardt says.
The young people that Allen talks to don’t care about fellowships, book releases or magazine covers. It’s when Allen tells them he regularly photographs basketball star Stephen Curry for Baltimore-based sports gear company Under Armour that they perk up. This is Allen’s entry to let them know his life didn’t start out so differently from theirs.
Allen grew up in the West Forest Park neighborhood, the son of a strong matriarch. “I was spoiled,” he says. “I didn’t have all the designer things that I wanted, but all the snacks in the world and electricity always on.” Even so, Allen started to sell drugs in high school. It lasted just six years, but in that time Allen says he had lost more than five close friends to gun violence.
When he became a father at 21, he decided his hustling days were over. Turning to street photography, Allen became obsessed with documenting his surroundings, teaching himself the technical aspects through YouTube tutorials. Photography, he says, saved his life in ways that are not always metaphorical. When his best friend was killed, Allen recognized how easily he could have been present. “The only reason I wasn’t with him is because I went to go take pictures,” he says. “I turned to alcohol for a while to cope. But photography was really my medium to release that stress.”
Nothing could prepare him for how having all eyes on him would feel. The first Time cover brought with it national attention, but his success in the wake of a community in crisis weighed on Allen, who says he attempted suicide shortly after he started to gain notoriety. “My success is built on the broken back of Freddie Gray. It’s in the back of my mind every day,” says Allen, whose daily participation in the months-long uprising contributed to the stress. “We were getting tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed. I was getting harassed by police. … I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I’m dealing with my own personal PTSD and depression that I got from growing up here,” he says. “It was just too overwhelming. I cracked, you know.”
It was shortly thereafter that Allen, now 34, felt he needed his own brand of activism to evolve. “Photography saved me mentally, physically and emotionally, and I feel like it could do the same for so many younger kids,” he says. He started a GoFundMe campaign for his program called Inspire the Youth in June 2015, and it quickly gained local attention before reaching Russell Simmons, who donated $25,000.
Allen was equipped with cameras and enthusiasm, but his first efforts fell somewhat flat. “I was like, ‘Who wants to learn photography?’ The kids cussed me out,” he recalls with a laugh. But when 20 students had dwindled to five, he had curated a small but passionate group. His next attempt, in collaboration with Windsor Hill Elementary/Middle School, resulted in so much interest that Allen held an essay contest to select 10 students. Their work resulted in a photo exhibit at the Baltimore art center Motor House. The following workshop, at Kids Safe Zone, garnered national media attention. Although his own career and the pandemic have made running a regular program difficult, Allen continues to visit schools and regularly hands out cameras to kids in the community — an estimated 600 to date.
Recently, while on a photo shoot for the opening credits of HBO series “We Own This City,” Allen ran into Keshana Miller, 20, seven years after he taught her at Kids Safe Zone. “She came and showed me some of her recent work that she’s done using her phone and told me how she’s still into photography,” he says. Impressed by her dedication, Allen promised to get Miller a camera. As Miller prepares to finish high school this summer, in spite of some setbacks, she says art is vital to her life: “Art is a part of me. It helps me become a better person because it motivates me.”
Allen recognizes that remaining on home turf has categorized him with the civil rights movement and street photography, but sees it not so much as a niche as a calling. Staying in Baltimore also makes him more accessible to the people he wants to inspire: “At the end of the day, when I’m old and I can’t hold a camera steady no more, I’m going to measure my own personal success by how many kids I saved,” he says. “That’s why I’m still in Baltimore.”
Carita Rizzo is a writer based in Paris.