(birds chirping) (birds continue chirping) (birds continue chirping) (shutter clicks) (birds continue chirping) (birds continue chirping) - How do you take one picture and tell a story?

Like, a video is cool, but you need a machine to watch It's the most powerful thing if you could do it in one shot.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) I collect a lot of stuff to really talk about, you know, Blackness and, you know, a lot of Black collectible stuff, a lot of history.

So, see this ad here?

This is Newport.

See, the couple's getting married on a motorcycle, but look at the Black.

See?

They're not married, you know?

They actually don't promote marr For them, they promote marriage, for us, it's just dating.

Little things, you know, in the world that we see, you don't realize it's happening to us, you know, and our brain tells us what to think and do.

Kept this magazine for a long ti because this is what I always sa about when people photograph Bla See, look at this, this cover.

(soothing music) You know, you've got the wedding a family portrait, a kid with his dog, a man posing, crying.

So, it's not like it's a negative shot of something, someone doing something, you know, negative, but it's, you know, it's why this shot, you know?

So, a woman's crying, it's black and white.

It doesn't always show the power the power in the community.

It shows weakness, not that it doesn't belong here, but no one else here is weak but her.

When I photograph somebody, I'm trying to find the power, the beauty in their power, who they are.

I can't find it out there, I create it myself.

- Steven is so many things.

He's an artist, he's a photograp He's trained as a photographer because that's what his technical medium is, but his artistry goes far beyond image-making.

- Steven, as a photographer now, is someone who has a vision and a body of work that the art world isn't necessarily ready to digest and interpret.

It isn't prepared.

- [Steven] When I first started, I had no money, which is why I shot in black and Not that they shot in color anyw but I had enough money to eat, buy some film, and shoot.

I remember I was at the corner of 9th and F Streets, and I went to this place called Penny Camera and bought a pack of film.

I was gonna take these black and white pictures in Polaroid.

So, my first picture I took was of this girl as she was rushing on the bus, and it came out, and she looked at it and gave it back to me, and I was like, this is not gonna work, but I was with a friend of mine, who said, "Steve, don't give up, don't give up."

So, I killed the black and white and went and got color Polaroids and then I was charging, like, $3 or $5 for a picture.

So, every time I got the money, I'd buy another pack of film, and I'd just sit on the corner, right, at 9th and F Streets and take people's pictures.

- And then he was also just capturing the, you know, sort of still life, of moments on the street just in his neighborhood, just taking pictures of people as they were going to church.

This one picture that he created it looks like the Norman Rockwel with the old lady and a man going to church.

The little kids playing, shooting hoops in Mill Creek, there are just a lot of images that he just created, that they will have some value n but at the time, he was just shooting his world.

(soothing music continues) - He captures the depth and essence of Black people, the dignity, the honor, and glorifying Black images as o to negative, sensationalistic portrayals of Black people.

One of my favorite images is of this Black boy, and he has his own metal, and he has his chin thrown up.

Those photographs mean self-empo and somehow he's able to capture that moment, where most people don't see that (soothing music continues) - I was always taking pictures, and then I had a friend of mine who worked at the Smithsonian from college.

She said they were looking for a photographer down at the museum, which was a pre-African American museum, is the one they built to get rea for the one they have now.

And so, there's a lady there named Deborah Willis.

She hired me to take some photog of four artist professors.

(light jazz music) And then, the check came.

It was like $5,000.

I couldn't believe it, $5,000!

Me and my wife went back and, oh I'm really a photographer now, you know, it was crazy.

So, that was my real break.

(light jazz music continue) So, then they hired me for one y When I first got there, I was like, man, this is not for me.

One of the things in the back of my mind was, well, if I go to the Smithsonian, people will finally recognize me as a photographer.

Before, I was just Steven who takes pictures, so it validated me, and my first photo shoot for the they had this show called Collector's Passion.

This is right after 9/11, so The New York Times came down to visit all the museu you know, Smithsonians in the ar and I'd shot this photograph of all these collections of these people's stuff, and they wanted to use my photograph for the front page of the Art Section in The New Yo So, it was like, damn, this boy I felt I was bringing a more art to the Smithsonian photography.

The museum was getting a lot of a lot of photographs put out there from my work.

I stayed there for seven years.

I traveled for them, I went all over the country photographing Black communities, me doing this one thing called Black Celebrations all around the country.

I wanted to show the power and t of this Black community.

I always felt like we weren't really portrayed in the right way.

(light jazz music continue) I wanted to find the beauty in just people out there doing their thing without having from someplace bad to someplace You see, that's the power.

That's the beauty of the community, is it's already there You just have to look for it.

It's easier to find the others.

- The Smithsonian job turned out not to be where he could take his camera and roam and take images.

(emotionally tense music) Even if you get the great job, you still don't get to be yourse - [Robert] When he was a photographer for the Smithsonian that job was killing him because it wanted too much of hi He struggled to try to put himself into this job, where, you know, there's a struc and people tell you what to do.

There were cool parts of it, but there were also things that were stifling to him, and I think some of the struggles that he had then was that he really wasn't built I mean, he was built to do his o and to figure out his own way.

(emotionally tense music continu - [Steven] I realized that I wasn't the same after seven years of working for the government.

It's like if you're a lion, and every day, they feed you mea Then, one day, you're back out in the jungles and you can't hunt anymore.

- [David] For Steven, figuring out who he is and how to be himself and expres I think that job pushed him in the direction of going to MICA to get the cred to be a fine artist.

(soft buzzing) - After a year of just taking pi decided to go to grad school.

I did apply at MICA, (soft tapping) like, early '90s, and I didn't g I showed my work to someone, and she said I had too much rang so I reapplied this time with one body of work, which was my black and white work, and I got in.

I was never the best student.

I never went to art school befor and the first year, it was tough My first year there, I met this His name was BK Adams.

So, we started talking, and I asked him, I said, "Hey, what do you wanna be, what do you wanna do?"

He said, "I wanna be an artist, I wanna be famous."

He said, "Man, how hard could it We hung out a lot, and I was taking a lot of pictur and I was trying to figure out what I was gonna do for my thesis at MICA.

So, I wound up doing it on him.

Eventually, things started to ta and The Washington Post wound up doing a story on us about him and his art, so that was like a big break for me and for him.

(emotionally tense music continu Once I left MICA, I worked with him for a while, then I started to do my own phot (emotionally tense music continu I got pictures of my kids in here, you know.

Everything's all mixed together, so I'll just sometimes, in the m I'll come up here and just go through different negatives.

Like this, this is the coolest shot right here.

So, here's a picture I took of t I don't remember his name, I have his obituary, though.

He was the only witness in the Emmett Till murder, and they did a documentary on Emmett Till at the Hirshhorn, and I took this really cool photograph of him, you know?

Yeah, so this is different stuff So, these are all my negatives.

This is a crazy amount of negatives, crazy.

(emotionally tense music continu Somehow I haven't even really slightly caught up yet.

Oh, this is Obama's inauguration Yeah, Obama's inauguration.

This is like when I really kind of stopped taking pictures, after this.

I figured having a Black preside was a good time and a good place - The photographs that he takes the everyday community, I think, are beautiful.

I mean, it's almost like a Black Norman Rockwell, and I hate to compare White artists with Black artists and put the word Black in front but I'm just doing that so the audience understands what I'm communicating.

- Steven always seems to have an in presenting Washington's Black community and the history of Washington in a very positive He is very steadfast in his unde of preserving a certain level of Black culture.

(emotionally tense music continu - [Steven] My "Chocolate City Rest In Peace" project, when I came to D.C., my first thing was I couldn't be the city looked like this.

It looked like Baltimore does now, you know?

It was a lot of abandoned houses, a lot of crime.

It was rough.

(emotionally tense music continu All of my photographs have people in them, most of them.

I found that, over time, the background tells a story to now because the buildings have changed so much.

You know, the architecture, it's the same architecture, but it's all fixed up now.

You didn't really see the beauty in the city because it looked so bad.

- I think his work has shown a progression just simply because of how most cities in America have changed.

What he's showing is that D.C. is a microcosm of America, I bel and because D.C. was once such a predominantly Black city and community, that growth and progression, now you can actually see where i If you came here maybe two years you would probably think it was always like this, no sense of what existed prior to being here.

- Initially, it was hard because here you're looking at taking these photographs and calling the show "Chocolate City Rest In Peace".

How do the people living in the Chocolate City feel when you say, rest in peace, you And it took a long time to just accept the fact that this is what it is.

If you have a terminal diagnosis and it's not like you die that d but the writing's on the wall, the city is not gonna be chocolate anymore.

No matter what people do, it's a wrap.

It's not going back.

- When I think of the topic of gentrification and I think of Steven's work, I think of transition of time and transition of space and lack of permanence.

Maybe some photographers look to shoot work and capture a place and time perhaps with the idea that it's not permanent, but also perhaps with an emotional attachment to it remaining as it is.

I don't see that component in Steven's work.

I see an acknowledgement of the city having a past and, perhaps, uncertainty.

- One of my friends had this ana you know, the Scotts lawn weed killer, right?

He would say, you know, "People think weed killer kills but what weed killer really does it strengthens the grass."

So, I started thinking, you know, 'cause in my neighborhood, a lot of people have left.

A lot of people stayed, too.

So, if you were a weed, when it got strengthened, you got squeezed out.

If you were grass, you could sta So, that's kind of how I look at it, you know, it's nice.

A lot of people needed to go.

They were bad for the neighborho So, that's how I see it, you know, unfortunately, but it's a better neighborhood now that a lot of those problem people are gone - So, his analogy to the weed eater, I get it, but sometimes we have to realize that we're the weed, and I can't just think that, you know, it's just this, you know, cleaning out of all bad because culture goes, so many, diversity goes, and what comes in is money.

So, if you're talking about it from the standpoint of a weed-eating, the grass may never get replaced You just might be stuck with dir (emotionally tense music continu (emotionally tense music continu (emotionally tense music continu (emotionally tense music continu - When a photo is art, it will survive as a distinct artifact of Chocolate City.

(emotionally tense music continu He is a Black intellectual artis who is really taking his time and carving out what he is trying to convey.

(upbeat jazz music) - I really look for someone to help carry the picture beside so it's not all about me, but I' - Steven's self portraits are very interesting.

He has an inner comedic satire that I think comes out in his wo He did a series of street art po of him wearing a hat and glasses that he canvased the city for years in an anonymous way.

No one knew it was him, but people who know Steven know it was him.

- You know, I don't know the first time I saw that.

I mean, something tells me it was on some type of electrical box or something down by the monument.

(upbeat jazz music continues) - That wheat paste that Steven created of that image of himself was ubiquitous.

You couldn't go north-east, south-east, south-west (chuckles without seeing that photo put on an electrical box, put on an empty space somewhere.

It was everywhere.

- [Billy] It was interesting that it was during the time when a lot of people were kind of unsuccessfully trying to pull off stunts like that, and he did it.

So, it was good.

(upbeat jazz music continues) - One of the ladies I photograph used to come by and we'd take pi One day, we took this picture to It was a big picture, and I had this coat on, and two little heads in this pic I was like, man, so I took this picture, I just cropped it.

You know, I just cropped it and I blew it up.

When I blew it up, it just broke so it didn't look like a photograph anymore.

(upbeat jazz music continues) First thing I did was I made stickers out of it, and I put these stickers around all over the city, by all the bus stops.

(upbeat jazz music continues) So, then I started doing posters You know, I made 'em bigger, and I started just posting them all over the city.

One time, it was a Sunday mornin I was out doing posters on Capit and I was like, let me do one mo So, I go down by the baseball st and do one poster over there.

(ball bouncing softly) (upbeat jazz music continues) (bell ringing) I started heading out of there, a cop pulls me over.

(loud siren wailing) (upbeat jazz music continues) Pulls me over and he says, "How We got a phone call that somebod putting up posters all over the neighborhood."

He said, "Do you know anything about about that?"

I said, "Nothing about that, no.

He said, "Okay, license and regi So, he goes back to the car, and his partner comes back, and "You know, kind of wanna know if you're putting posters up," and I was like, "Okay, yeah, it You know, he was cool about it 'cause it was obvious it was me.

He said, "I thought that was you I love your work."

So, he said, "My partner's gonna do a quick check on you and you'll be on your way," then "Do you have any posters on you," and I said, "Sure."

He said, "Can I get one," I said "The minute my partner's finished, you know, you can give me a poster."

So, I get out of the van to get him my poster.

There's like five police cars back there, man.

So, I'm signing posters for all these cops, you know, giving them posters, so that was kind of cool, you know?

So, I realized then that people liked it, you know.

It just validated me as an artis - So, when he places himself in front of the camera, he is sacrificing his own personal identity to represent larger ideas and co around Black masculinity and Black artistry.

- [Roger] When people look at hi it probably hits a nerve with th because it's not there anymore, and I think that's extremely imp to preserve the culture of the people who are from D.C. - [Eric] The discourse on Black masculinity in the context of modern art is and I think what Steven is doing is contributing a body of work that furthers this discussion in ways that are new and unexplo (soothing music) (seagulls cawing) - [Steven] I think people see me thinking I'm too much sometimes, how I carry myself, but I look for the same things i I'm looking for that look, I'm looking for that person who's like, yeah, you're owning this picture, you know, this is good, and I think that's what gives the power in the photographs.

(soothing music continues) - [Gloria] Soul is everything.

If you can get a piece of art that has soul in it, it literally lives forever, and that probably is the most valuable part of his pieces.

- [Robert] His work captures a piece of history.

The art gets to speak.

- [David] Where he is right now, in a place of awareness, in a place of experience, in a place of artistic confidence, it would be a really good time for people to start paying atten (soothing music continues) - [Steven] I want people to see in the community that got overlooked, you know?

We're not all of these extremes.

We're just these beautiful peopl that are just trying to figure it out like everybody else, and that's what I want people to from my photography.

(soothing music continues) (soothing music continues) (soothing music continues) (soothing music continues) (soothing music continues) (soothing music fades)