How one photographer is using his camera as a weapon against poverty and racism

Devin Allen got his first camera in 2013 — a Canon that his grandmother had purchased for him on credit from Best Buy. The self-taught photographer had begun exploring the form a year before, taking pictures of the poetry scene in his native Baltimore with a camera on loan from a friend.

That spawned an interest in the history of photography, particularly the contributions of Black photographers, that led Allen to study the work of the late Gordon Parks, who said “I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America — poverty, racism, discrimination.”

Photography proved to be life-changing for Allen, who had felt powerless growing up in Baltimore and seeing his community struggle with many of the same socio-economic injustices that Parks had turned his camera on in the middle of the 20th century. As a young man, Allen saw how educational inequality, gentrification, violence, drugs, poverty and police brutality hurt his neighbors. He also lost several close friends to murder.