Remembering the Stains on the Sidewalk
For each of the 318 homicides that occurred in Baltimore City in 2016, I returned to the scene of the crime* on the exact day at the exact time, one year later, and took a photo to commemorate the life that was lost there exactly one year before. That meant that if a person was killed on the 100 block of Main Street at 2:30 AM on December 25, 2016, then at 2:30 AM on December 25, 2017, I could be found on the 100 block of Main street with my camera in hand.
The photos are meant to capture the quiet stillness of a space that a person was once a part of and has since departed. The mission of Remembering the Stains on the Sidewalk was to take time out of my day to experience and pause in the spaces where so many individual people had lived instants before they died, and then share that moment with others. I did this as a ritual for each of the homicide victims of Baltimore City in order to remember each of them as individual human beings.
*The locations of photos are not exact. I used publicly available information from the Baltimore Sun Homicide Map as well as other news articles to get the data I used, including name, age, location, and time.
