A 2014 image of the historic three-story brick buildings at 1390 and 1388 W. North Ave. in Baltimore. Photo by James Singewald
A Maryland-based photographer and archivist brings his eye for detail to MTSU’s Baldwin Photographic Gallery for a new exhibit, Baltimore: Block by Block, Work in Progress . . ., featuring more than 40 striking examples of the city’s architectural history.
James Singewald’s exhibit will be on display weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. through Thursday, Oct. 28, in Room 269 of the university’s Bragg Media and Entertainment Building.
The Baldwin Gallery connected with Singewald with the help of MTSU photography professor Jonathan Coulter Trundle, who’s known him since the two were at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Singewald’s “obsessive collection of mapping, archiving and memorializing Baltimore,” as he puts it, began 13 years ago while he was a graduate student there.
“My graduate thesis was encapsulated in the form of a self-published book titled Old Town, East Baltimore, which specifically focused on the failed urban renewal project in East Baltimore known as Old Town Mall, formerly Gay Street,” Singewald says.
“The failure of this project left the area a desolate two-block pedestrian mall. By photographing each of the buildings on the mall, I created a historical document of what is left of the neighborhood after decades of decline.”
He also turned his photographs into an opportunity to talk with lifelong residents and business owners to help understand the mall’s history and learn about, and share, the residents’ hopes for its renewal.
This 2013 series of image of the historic three-story brick buildings in the 1100 block of West Baltimore Street in Baltimore, Maryland, showing both the decline and the gentrification of the area.
Over the last decade, the project has grown into a larger work, Baltimore: A History, Block by Block, with Singewald photographing 10 main streets in Baltimore and more than 100 city blocks to date. He uses a 4-by-5-inch view camera and Fujichrome Velvia slide film to further showcase the “melancholic nostalgia, romanticization and ramification of the obsolete” in Baltimore’s historic buildings.
Singewald plans to create a series of photographic books and lectures on Baltimore’s architecture and a comprehensive, free digital archive of his photos. Find more information about Singewald’s work at jsingewald.com.
The MTSU exhibit features 43 of Singewald’s striking color prints. For more information about MTSU’s Baldwin Photographic Gallery, visit baldwinphotogallery.com.
