BMA to Open First Comprehensive Survey Exploring Baltimore’s Pivotal Role in the Evolution of Photography

BALTIMORE, MD (April 30, 2026 / UPDATED August 10, 2026)—This fall, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will present Flashback: Two Centuries of Baltimore Photography, the first comprehensive exhibition to examine Baltimore’s pivotal role in the evolution of photography. Spanning more than 185 years and featuring more than 200 works by 90 named artists and historic studios,Flashbackreveals Baltimore as an epicenter for innovation in documentary and portrait photography. The exhibition includes era-defining practitioners such asA. Aubrey Bodine, Elinor B. Cahn, Carl Clark, Roland L. Freeman, Robert Houston, Irving Henry Phillips Sr., and Kenneth Royster, as well as contemporary artists Devin Allen, Jim Burger, Joseph Mario Giordano, Connie Imboden, Kei Ito, Elle Pérez, Gioncarlo Valentine, Elena Volkova, and SHAN Wallace, among others. Flashback is a ticketed exhibition on view from October 4, 2026, through February21, 2027. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalog and a citywide Flashback Open Call inviting contemporary photographers to share new visions of Baltimore.

Drawn from the BMA’s extensive holdings and supplemented by key loans from the Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Maryland Center for History and Culture, International Center of Photography, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Flashback explores the medium through Baltimore’s studios, streets, neighborhoods, and collective gatherings where photography was embraced early as a tool for self‑representation, community-building, and civic engagement. The exhibition highlights the importance of photographers collaborating with their subjects, documenting protests from inside the crowd, and using photography as a practice of care and remembrance. In doing so, Flashback offers an expansive account of photography’s social role across generations, while providing a nuanced portrait of Baltimore that also affirms the city as an important site of photographic history.

“Flashbackadds a compelling new chapter to our understanding of photography’s emergence as an artistic medium and as a critical tool in documenting communal and individual life. The exhibition is the result of extensive research that reveals Baltimore as an unequivocal historic site of innovation and community engagement,” said Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “Equally, this exhibition offers a dynamic, polyphonic view of our city that boldly upends perceptions shaped by fictionalized narratives. I look forward to showing visitors the true Baltimore through its many captivating images.”

The exhibition is organized into several thematic sections:

The opening section of the exhibition establishes the earliest links between Baltimore’s emergence as a modern American city and the foundations of photography. Baltimore was an early epicenter of photographic innovation. In 1840, just months after encountering Louis Daguerre’s invention in Europe, Henry Fitz Jr. opened one of the first daguerreotype studios in the United States in Baltimore—marking photography’s arrival alongside the city’s growth as a port and industrial center. Flashback features rare daguerreotypes, tintypes, and Civil War-era photographs that reveal how photography quickly became entangled with questions of labor, race, mobility, and power. Works by pioneering women and Black-owned studio photographers such as Dora Russell and Arthur Laidler Macbeth demonstrate how access to the camera enabled new forms of visibility and self‑authorship. Frederick Douglass was one of the first to recognize this and a portrait of him taken in 1841, three years after his escape from bondage in Fells Point, is the earliest known image of the man who would become the most photographed person of the 19th century. These historic images mark photography’s radical potential: to make underrepresented people visible to themselves and others.

A defining thread of Flashback is Baltimore’s longstanding culture of embedded, relational photography created through direct community engagement. From Roland L. Freeman’s empathetic documentation of arabbers to Irving Henry Phillips Sr.’s decades of photojournalism for the Afro‑Americannewspaper, this ethos continues through landmark documentary projects of the 1970s such as the NEA‑funded Equitable Trust Company Maryland Survey and East Baltimore Documentary Project. The latter placed photographers in long‑term dialogue with residents, pairing photographs with oral histories to establish a record of place and the people within it. Contemporary artists such as SHAN Wallace extend this legacy by returning images to their subjects, emphasizing photography as an act of reciprocity and care. Across generations, these works demonstrate how Baltimore photographers have consistently blurred the line between portraiture and documentary storytelling—using the camera to build connection, affirm dignity, and generate shared memory.

This section traces Baltimore’s photographic engagement with protest, performance, and public life—from civil rights demonstrations and contemporary movements for racial justice to queer nightlife. Many of the photographers represented here placed themselves within the crowd, collapsing the distance between documentarian and participant. Contemporary images by Devin Allen, Sheila Pree Bright, Joseph Mario Giordano, and Shawn Hubbard capture the 2015 Baltimore Uprising and 2020 Black Lives Matters protests as a collective experience rather than a distant event. Images of nightlife, performance, and self‑fashioning reveal the city as a space where a spectrum of identities is declared and expressed. In these works, photography becomes a tool for encounters that register urgency, vulnerability, and the ongoing struggle over how Baltimore and its people are seen.

This section also focuses on the ubiquity of photography in print media with images that draw on photojournalism as subject matter. An adjacent Reading Room has an ambient soundtrack curated by the BMA’s composer-in-residence Ultra Naté and publications selected by Baltimore-based artists, librarians, and cultural workers to highlight both the important role news photography has played in shaping history and as well as the variety of printed formats­—photo books, zines, newspapers, and more. Flashback is also supplemented with a digital guide to the exhibition, an audio guide with 16 stops, a newsprint takeaway, an accessibility guide with visual descriptions (available online), as well as tactile and reflection activities in the galleries.

While much of photography’s public power lies in its documentary force, its most enduring role is often intimate. This section focuses on photography’s use in marking life cycles: birth, childhood, family, partnership, aging, loss, and remembrance. Cary Beth Cryor’s Rites of Passage series records childbirth from within the frame, collapsing distinctions between photographer and subject, while works by Saskia Kahn, Jack Radcliffe, and Gioncarlo Valentine explore memory, care, and kinship across generations. Some experimental approaches such as Kei Ito’s photograms and Elena Volkova’s tintypes nod toward inherited histories. Together, these works present photography as an act of re‑membering—gathering lived experience into shared meaning—closing the exhibition with the stories and relationships that underlie life in Baltimore.

Flashback is co-curated by Dr. Leslie Cozzi, BMA Curator and Department Head of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, and Antoinette Roberts, BMA Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art; with Jenna Paper-Evers, BMA Curatorial Assistant, Prints, Drawings and Photographs; and initial contributions by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, former BMA Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings and Photographs. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that captures the BMA’s research and image highlights.

This is the first book to uncover Baltimore’s remarkable and often overlooked role in the evolution of photography. Featuring 50 stunning images from the exhibition and an essay by it curators, the volume traces two centuries of innovation, artistry, and cultural change in one extraordinary city.

Prices are $15 for adults, $13 for seniors, $12 for groups of 7 or more, $5 for students with ID, and $5 for youth ages 7-18. BMA Members, children ages 6 and under, and student groups are admitted free.

The BMA has inviting photographers to submit work for the Flashback Open Call, a rotating exhibition that seeks to amplify voices and visions that capture the complexity, beauty, and lived experience of Baltimore—particularly from photographers who have not had extensive professional exhibition opportunities. Selected photographers will have their work featured in a rotating presentation at the BMA’s main location and Lexington Market Branch from October 2026 through February 2027.

Exhibition research and interpretation was supported by an advisory panel of critics and historians: Lawrence Burney, writer, critic, and founder of True Laurels; Beth Saunders, Associate Director and Curator of Special Collections and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn Library at University of Maryland Baltimore County; Shannon Perich, Curator, Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography, Visual Anthropology, and Contemporary History at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; Deirdre Cross, former Director of Public Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; Deyane Moses, Director, Programs & Partnerships, Afro Charities; educator, curator, and founder of Blackives, LLC; and Angela N. Carroll, writer, curator and art historian; Adjunct Professorial Lecturer, College of Arts & Sciences, American University.

This exhibition is supported by The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Exhibition Endowment Fund, Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff, Murthy/NAYAK Global Photography Endowment Fund, and Stuart and Becky Cooper. The catalog is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Publication Endowment Fund. The media partner is WJZ-TV.

Founded in 1914, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) inspires people of all ages and backgrounds through exhibitions, programs, and collections that tell an expansive story of art—challenging long-held narratives and embracing new voices. Our outstanding collection of more than 97,000 objects spans many eras and cultures and includes the world’s largest public holding of works by Henri Matisse; one of the nation’s finest collections of prints, drawings, and photographs; and a rapidly growing number of works by contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds. The museum is also distinguished by a neoclassical building designed by American architect John Russell Pope and two beautifully landscaped gardens featuring an array of modern and contemporary sculpture. The BMA is located three miles north of the Inner Harbor, adjacent to the main campus of Johns Hopkins University, and has a community branch at Lexington Market. General admission is free so that everyone can enjoy the power of art.