On one side of the photograph, a line of simple brown brick houses stands with a group of African-American children crowded onto one stoop. Facing the older homes, on the opposite side of the street, is a line of brand-new three-story rowhouses, simultaneously stifling and affluent, clean but lifeless. In the center, a graffiti-tainted street sign slices the picture, like the city itself, in two.

Helen Keith, the mother of the photographer, sits in a makeshift classroom on the third floor of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on Washington Boulevard and glowingly elaborates on the dualistic theme of "what was and what's going to be" she sees in her daughter Maya's photograph: The crime and disrepair their Pigtown neighborhood has struggled with, yielding to the forces of urban renewal, growth, and hope. The photographer herself, an adorable 7 year old, listens patiently before offering her own inspiration. She was looking to document something negative, something that captured her exasperation with the trash that litters the area and the frequent shootings she has heard around her house that have left her "scared and afraid." But ultimately, she settled on the scene for more earthly reasons. "I was wondering," she says, "why would somebody write on a pole?"

Maya's photo is one of hundreds produced in a series of ten photography workshops held throughout the city by the local arts activist group Art on Purpose as part of its Real City, Dream City project. The idea was to give disposable cameras to residents of all ages in ten different neighborhoods, give them lessons in photography techniques and a bit of history, and turn them loose on their own neighborhoods. The result was not only fine art, but a photographic document of Baltimore through the eyes of its own, often marginalized, residents—snapshots that explore, in the words of Art on Purpose's hyperenthusiastic director, Peter Bruun, "the positive, the negative, and the possible for their neighborhoods."

It is the most ambitious project Art on Purpose has undertaken since Bruun founded the group last year, and it represents the kind of art-meets-social-activism raison d'etre he had in mind from the outset. Bruun came to Baltimore twenty years ago to attend the graduate program for painting at MICA. Years spent as an artist left him disenchanted with the gallery system, which, he says, turns art into a "commercial object."

Inspired in part by German sculptor Joseph Beuys, a World War II fighter pilot who went on to become an activist and a leading voice of the German Green Party, Bruun began to embrace art as a vehicle for social activism, in the spirit of what he describes as "the medieval model of art, or the African model, where the artist directly serves the community interest."

It is the social activism aspect of Real City, Dream City that Bruun sees as most crucial. Out of the hundreds of photographs, twenty were turned into postcards, with text written by community leaders and residents. They have become letters to the powers that be, pleas for change.

The postcards will be featured at a number of local shows, including an exhibition at the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center October 5 through 28. Art on Purpose and its partners (the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods, the Neighborhood Design Center, the Safe and Sound Campaign, and the Parks & People Foundation) hope to draw a number of local politicians and other civic leaders to an event at Eubie Blake in late October, just prior to the mid-term elections. (Go to www.artonpurpose.org for specific event details.)

The postcards will also appear in a supplementary album available during a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled The City Real and Ideal, an exhibit of fifteenth- to eighteenth-century prints of cities, running October 11, 2006, through March 11, 2007. Real City, Dream City was inspired in part by the BMA show. Elizabeth Rodini, curator of The City Real and Ideal and adjunct associate curator in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the BMA, thinks the two will make a perfect fit.

Rodini says that printmaking represented a revolutionary turn in the world of art, a new medium that allowed artists to "communicate ideas broadly to more people than painting had. In this sense, the technology of printing had a democratizing potential and the potential for social activism." Photography is another step in that same progression. "Photography is even more accessible, in that you don't have to be an expert to take pictures." 

Each neighborhood's unique character emerges in the Real City, Dream City photographs, but those taken in Midtown-Edmondson are particularly powerful. They have a distinct edge that embodies the devastation of the inner city—a young boy flashing gang signs, a dog barking behind a chain link fence—all the more remarkable because the participants were exclusively elementary-school children.

At the Midtown Edmondson Avenue Improvement Association, in a barren little building not far from the streets described in David Simon's The Corner, Zelda Robinson, a community activist who helped run the Real City, Dream City workshop, sits at a desk, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "It's all about the children."

Robinson doesn't need much prodding to launch into a litany about the disintegration of the neighborhood she has lived in for the better part of sixty years. But when she gets around to pulling out packets of dozens of photos the children in the workshop had taken, her austere-grandmother demeanor is replaced by a long, Whoopie-Goldberg-like smile. "I don't know what I expected," she says. "But when I saw these, I was in awe. It makes you wonder just how far they can go.

"You know," she continues, "for some of these kids, East Baltimore is like a foreign country. They have no cultural exposure. We used to have musical programs, art programs. When I was in school, we even had square dancing. I didn't know how the kids were going to react to this project, but they loved it. Every day there would be some new little boy at the door saying, ‘Can I come in?' And I had to let them in."

—Bill Mesler is a Baltimore-based freelancer and a regular contributor to Urbanite.