Photographer Aretta L. Baldon turns her lens in celebration of Atlanta’s Westside

On the Westside, Aretta L. Baldon says, a person can go from pre-K to becoming a doctor without ever leaving a one-mile radius, Atlanta Public Schools to Clark Atlanta, Spelman, Morris Brown, or Morehouse, then on to graduate programs like the Interdenominational Theological Center or Morehouse School of Medicine. “And then you can come back and serve,” she said.

That loop, a neighborhood that raises people up and gets something back in return, is the idea running through her photography exhibition, “Forever I Love Atlanta: Westside Story,” now showing at 960 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. NW.

“The Westside is often described through statistics, development plans, or headlines,” Baldon’s artist statement reads. “This exhibition tells a different story.”

Baldon arrived in Atlanta in 1991 from Springfield, Illinois, to attend Spelman College. “I say I was cornbread and peach fed, because I was green when I came down here,” she said. Her father had given her a camera before she left home, and though she’d always been the one in front of the lens at family gatherings, something shifted once she started documenting Spelman herself 

“I was the one with the camera capturing moments, and it really wasn’t technical, I wasn’t trained, it was just something that I enjoyed doing,” she said. The habit followed her back to the Westside as an adult, where clients like West Side Future Fund and Spelman College gave her a growing catalog of images — and, eventually, the raw material for a Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs grant she says outgrew its own ambitions. 

“The idea ended up being way bigger than what they were giving,” Baldon said. “I believed in the idea, and it’s like I need to make this happen.” She raised the rest with help from the city, West Side Future Fund, and City Council members Byron Amos, Eshe’ Collins, and Matt Westmoreland.

That same instinct,  to look at what’s already there and see something larger,  shapes how the show is built. Two of its central pieces are framed in materials pulled from buildings the Westside lost. An iron window grate salvaged from a demolished English Avenue house holds “Sankofa: Iron Sharpens Iron,” a collection of images of men across generations,  fathers and sons, coaches and athletes, mentors and students. Its wall text describes the piece as a study of “lessons being taught, stories being shared, and wisdom being passed forward,” with the reclaimed grate itself standing in as “a symbol of remembrance, responsibility, and connection.” 

A window reclaimed from a torn-down Hollowell Parkway apartment complex frames its companion piece, “Held,” built around women, mothers, sisters, mentors,  holding one another up.

“While the Sankofa represented the men in the male relationships, Held represents the female relationships,” Baldon said. She found the Sankofa mural itself almost by accident, stopped mid-stride on Sunset Avenue by a mockingbird’s song. “I turned around, I spoke to the bird, and then I looked”,  and saw work by community elder Tillman Ward, who she said “has held my feet to the fire” during her years on the Atlanta school board.

That habit of looking twice runs through the exhibit’s best-known image, taken on a dog walk near a MARTA station. Baldon saw a young man pacing and gesturing and assumed he was in distress, until she noticed the title of the library book in his hands. “I was like, he is reading Carter G. Woodson,” she said. “This man was not having a mental episode; he was in dialogue with this book.” The wall text distills the moment: “What changed in that moment wasn’t him. It was me.”

The Westside she’s photographing is also visibly in motion. “Pathways” follows the Beltline from its unpaved years,  when she and her daughter walked it “back when you would get a broken ankle”,  through its current form, tracking a neighborhood she jokes “officially flipped” once she started seeing strollers alongside longtime residents.

Its future, in Baldon’s telling, runs through young people,  and through C.J. Stewart, founder of the LEAD Center for Youth, whose portrait, “Breaking Barriers,” shows him in a “Mayor of Bankhead” T-shirt against a Grove Park mural. 

Stewart was drafted by the Chicago Cubs and played in their organization before returning to Atlanta, where he said he found himself “training young white kids in the suburbs” until, Baldon said, “he had an epiphany of why am I planting seeds in somebody else’s garden when I got a whole plethora of stuff I could develop on the West Side.”

That epiphany became LEAD, based at Washington High School, which Baldon says uses baseball and, more recently, tennis to reach kids through what the organization calls the three curveballs of life: crime, racism, and poverty. The program runs an ambassador track for older students, a junior ambassadors group, and a “rookie league” for younger kids, and requires every coach to complete its training.

 “Your coach can be the most influential person,” Baldon said, “and if they are not operating in a positive way, then that could be more detrimental than it is helpful.” Stewart, she noted, is among the roughly 4% of Atlantans born into poverty who make it out,  and chose to move back into the Bankhead community as a gift to himself on his 50th birthday.

Baldon serves on LEAD’s advisory council, a role she took on while serving on the Atlanta school board, where she also helped clear the way for a 2020 student-led protest following the deaths of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks.

Asked what all of it adds up to, Baldon didn’t hesitate.

“It’s the past, the present, and the future,” she said.

The exhibit is on display through July 11.

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