Interview
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John Clark Mayden is a photographer from and of Baltimore. An exhibition of his work, City People: Black Baltimore in the Photographs of John Clark Mayden, is at the George Peabody Library in Baltimore from October 7, 2019 through March 1, 2020. The accompanying book Baltimore Lives (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) contains 101 of Mayden's photographs. This interview was conducted by Christina Thomas, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins and, as the Denis Family Graduate Student Curatorial Fellow, co-curator of the exhibition.
You started taking photographs in the 1970s. Who was John Clark Mayden back then, and who are you today?
John Mayden in the early 1970s was a young guy who, you know, was happy to just be out on the street and walk, see, and record. That's who I was—happy to be recording images of the city. And to pursue opportunity. Photography gave me an outlet that I never saw coming. The pursuit of that outlet has taken me down a road to 25,000 negatives in 48 years. A lot of ups and, I guess, some downs. But it forced the best out of me.
Who am I now? Same guy. Well, an older John Clark Mayden. [Laughs.]
What was life like for you growing up in Baltimore? What did you and your siblings do for fun? [End Page 502]
Well, I only have one sibling: my sister, Ruth. And we love each other very much—but we would dispute and argue issues, both of us being very much issue-oriented. She is very opinionated and I, too, am opinionated. So, we can lock in there. But growing up with her, I watched her, because she was an achiever. And I thought, I'm going to outdo her. I set my goal to hit a little bit higher in different ways. That's what I was thinking; whether or not I did it is something else! My sister Ruth always was a standard to measure yourself by. Before she retired, she was Dean of the School of Social Work at Bryn Mawr College.
Back in the Fifties and Sixties, it was sort of a working-class neighborhood that I grew up in, and there were role models in there. It was stable. And then in the late Sixties I saw a change—where a lot of folks who didn't have as much and weren't working moved into the neighborhood. When I was in college from '70 to '74, I saw a significant change in the neighborhood for the worse. It wasn't the neighborhood I grew up in anymore, going to parties in the basements of people's homes and having fun during the summer, eating crab and acting silly, dancing in the basements. It changed; the whole deal changed.
What area in Baltimore did you grow up in—east or west?
Northwest. On Ruskin Avenue, near Auchentoroly Terrace. Near Druid Hill Park.
Those neighborhoods used to be so beautiful. I haven't been back through there in a while, but the memories are great.
Were your parents born in Baltimore as well?
My father was, but my mother was born in North Carolina and her family moved up here. But she lived here most of her life; she came here as a child. They were both here for most of their lives. [End Page 503]
What schools did you attend?
[P.S.] 137, which no longer exists, off of Fulton Avenue, down in that part. The school actually gave us a fairly decent education. There were a lot of kids crammed in that school. They used the school building and a church that was converted to be a school. When you were in the earlier years, you were down there in the church, and then you went up to the primary school. And they got you an education. It wasn't a bad education, I would say. They taught some fundamentals. I had a rough time, though. I had asthma and I missed...
