The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

Lloyd Wolf can’t point to the day, but he has seen more than his share of them. With his camera, he documents them. “Pure art from the heart” is what he calls them.

“No one needs a Martha Stewart book about how to build a shrine,” says Lloyd, who has also come to think of them as Washington Monuments. “What they all have in common is that they come from the same heart-felt place.”

I met Lloyd in his early days of mentoring 12-year-old Dion. He was teaching him photography in a program called “Streets to Skills.” It was Lloyd’s protégé who inadvertently sparked the idea of photographing the shrines.

The two lived in different worlds. Lloyd is White and Jewish and lives in the Virginia suburbs. Dion is Black and grew up in a tough Southeast neighborhood, where he watched some friends and relatives give in to the pull of the drug culture. Now Dion is 30 and married and Lloyd is godfather to his children.

One day Lloyd was driving Dion home. “It was a gorgeous days, and the city was all lit up,” Lloyd recalls. “I said, ‘My, Washington is so pretty.’ (Dion) said, ‘Yeah, but it’s so bad.’”

In that moment Lloyd was reminded of how they see life through different eyes. He remembered that Dion grew up when the District was called “the murder capitol,” that Lloyd used to go back to his suburban home afraid his young mentee might get killed. So on the day that he was driving with Dion in the car, Lloyd, who has always had an open heart, committed to opening his heart yet wider.

He considered the shrines paying tribute to the victims of so many murders, and he considered those shrines Washington’s “other” monuments.

“The shrines are visible evocation of the pain in people’s lives,” he says. “When I see these shrines I have multiple feelings. Some of them show how bad a gang banger or how rough and tough the person was. But I am reminded, too, that this is somebody’s brother, somebody’s child,” he said.

He sees life’s complexities in shrines that may have both Bibles and “pictures of people giving the finger.” He has noticed that liquor bottles are often displayed.

“I’ve met people who go to them to drink-- and it’s not cheap liquor. It’s a way to show honor. I wonder if this is some unconscious effort left over from the African tradition of pouring libations,” he says.

What Lloyd does know is that often these shrines are monuments to people whose deaths seem to go unnoticed by the media. Sometimes, they honor people from families who can’t afford headstones to mark their graves.

“As an artist, I feel like I have collected the public and secret—outer and inner life—of the city and I have become privy to it,” says Lloyd. “It’s increased my belief in the power of human emotions. It matters to us to communicate and to mark; to make marks both for ourselves and others,” he adds.

“The number of people lost in Iraq is a tragedy and we mourn them, as we should,” says Lloyd. “But we have this wave of murder that goes on in our own cities and we’ve become immune to it.”

With their faded teddy bears and balloons leaking helium, people are screaming at us to do something. As we enter a new year, amid the twinkling lights shining everywhere, perhaps we can think of something new to try. Or at the least, we can do as Lloyd has done, we can open our hearts wider and see differently.

To view some of Lloyd Wolf’s photos of Washington’s monuments, go to
http://lloydwolfphoto.blogspot.com/.