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Redeveloping Our Narrative Through the Photographic Lens with Ruddy Roye and Devin Allen 10/4 4pm



Explore today's important conversations and the moments in between at different focal points. Acclaimed documentary photographers, Ruddy Roye and Devin Allen share their unique perspectives and backstory on capturing the shot.


This Leica Conversation is presented in partnership with Photoville.



Devin Allen is a self-taught artist, born and raised in West Baltimore. He gained national attention when his photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time Magazine in May 2015 – only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had been featured. Five years later, after the deaths of George Floyd, Tony Mcaded, and Breonna Taylor, his photograph from a BlackTrans Lives Matter protest was published on the cover of Time Magazine for the 2nd time in June 2020. His photographs have also appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Aperture . Allen's work is also featured in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and the winner of the 2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for his book, A Beautiful Ghetto, and received the We Rise Award from The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture for dynamic leadership in the Arts and Activism.


Ruddy Roye is a Brooklyn based portrait and documentary photographer born in Montego Bay, Jamaica. He uses his camera as a tool that allows him to document the world around him, as he sees it. The images he produces speak to the human condition, addressing the myriad instances of suffering and injustice he witnesses daily, images that are often overlooked. Yet the images he produces of events such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Black Lives Matter movement, chronic homelessness, and his own personal project When Living is A Protest, do not merely exist to capture misery, but also to convey resilience and compassion. Roye’s portraits are frequently produced as a collaboration with the people he photographs, along with text that further humanizes them and evades their exploitation. Roye is inspired by the raw and gritty lives of grassroots people, poor people, the disenfranchised and especially those of his homeland of Jamaica. He strives to tell the stories of their victories and ills by bringing their voices to social media, and to matte-fiber paper. He is a part of Kamoinge, a collective of African-American photographers, and was featured in the recent documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (2014), a feature-length film on Black photographers and photography in America, directed by Thomas Allen Harris. Roye has been named one of The 50 Greatest Street Photographers Right Now by COMPLEX (January 2014). Roye was named TIME’s Instagram Photographer of 2016. Although Roye showcases his work in traditional exhibition environments, by posting his images on Instagram he is able to engage with over a quarter of a million followers, bridging the divide between viewer and collaborator, and collapsing the space between artist and audience to facilitate deeper engagement and understanding.



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