The Five Dollar House

This week I went back into the deeper sections of Baltimore. Amazingly enough, I always come out completely unharmed, and happy. God is surely watching over me, because no one else there is.

To my suprize, people are more friendly than others make them out to be. Some are annoyingly 'too' friendly, but overall (aside from all of the cursing), these people are only victims of poverty-as I have always said.

I ended up talking with one man (who was standing around a group that sat vigorously playing chess on random tables while drinking beer) and he was amazed at the fact that I was 'so brave' to come into that area. But he tried to assure me that 'these people are good people', and that 'there are police all around', and 'aint no one want to go to jail for causing trouble, so just don't photograph any drug deals or come at night and you'll be iight'.
The younger man next to him and the woman on his side were both agreeing that people here are only trying to get by and avoid the trouble. Its so hard when you are being fed two mixed messages: A. is one side of Baltimore tells you that the ghetto is the most evil place in the world and that I will surely get hurt if I continue, and B. is the other side, normally welcoming me in, always talking to me to find out what I am all about, and insisting that they are normal people, just like the rest.


When I was there photographing abandoned looking burnt down apartments, I stopped to witness a couple coming out of them. I was amazed at the fact that some people still are forced to live in places like these! Its a shame.

When I continued to photograph them, another man (that I had previously photographed and met before) came up to me and said his hellos, then went straight into talking about the places I was photographing. I couldn't believe what I heard when he finished his story. He told me that the man who lived inside the house I was shooting had choked someone to death for $5. Then, because the man who bet the $5 never gave him his money, he stabbed him to death as well. Now the guy is in jail serving his time. But I dont understand...What must have gone through this mans head for him to go to such extremes?.....or was he even thinking at all?












Five Dollar House.