Monday, January 30, 2012
A Click in Time
With help from Kickstarter, photographer James Singewald begins project to document historic blocks of Baltimore.
Posted by Anissa Elmerraji on Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:56 AM
After raising more than $5,000 from a successful Kickstarter campaign, photographer James Singewald is now ready to begin an ambitious project to document the historical architectural “gems” of the city through film. The project, which he calls Baltimore: A History, Block by Block, will focus on ten main commercial streets: Howard, Eutaw, Baltimore, Broadway, Fayette, Pennsylvania, Greenmount, North, Monument, and Lexington—all areas that, in their prime, were at the heart of downtown Baltimore, but have since been largely forgotten or neglected.
The project was inspired by and will be similar to Singewald's graduate thesis at the Maryland Institute College of Art: a photo narrative of Old Town Mall that he compiled into a book complete with research about the history of the neighborhood. Though not a Baltimore native himself, Singewald says his great grandfather once had a cigar shop in Old Town Mall. “That’s what brought me down there in the first place,” he says.
The draw of both projects, says Singewald who works part-time in the Imaging Services Department of the Maryland Historical Society, is the possibility of capturing the city at this moment in time as a way to document it. “The city is changing now,” says Singewald, whose job opened his eyes to how drastically these neighborhoods have changed over the past sixty years.
Singewald plans to shoot with a large format 4x5 Calumet Cambo camera and film that over-saturates color to make the buildings pop. “I like to say it sort of brings the buildings back in a way,” he says. He hopes to publish his completed photos in a series of books and also put them on display in galleries located within the photographed neighborhoods. Another Kickstarter campaign may be on the horizon in order to fund publications and gallery exhibitions, he says.
A longstanding fan of Baltimore architecture, Singewald hopes that the photos may help revive interest in the forgotten buildings. “I seek solutions to how to bring these historic places back to life,” writes Singewald on his Kickstarter page. “From past experience, I find that the more I photograph historical locations, the more people become interested in the history of the place.” If the surprising success of his Kickstarter campaign—he earned $800 more than his $4,300 goal in order to purchase film and supplies—is any indication of the public’s support for his cause, then chances are good he’ll do just that.
For more information about Baltimore: A History, Block by Block, visit www.jsingewald.com.
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