Truth is, if anything, elusive. It's a vague concept that twists and morphs between one person's imagination and another's, sprouting fresh versions of itself along the way. In other words, it's not a thing easily captured with a photograph.

So it's fortunate that truth isn't something Louisiana native and Baltimore transplant Ellis L. Marsalis III claims to capture in "Voices & Visions of Tha Bloc: An Exhibit by Ellis L. Marsalis III" on view at the Anacostia Museum through Aug. 12.

"The truth is more illusion than real," he says of his photography exhibition. "I am looking for the real in the eye and the brain. ... I was really trying to give the unadulterated view of [the neighborhood]."

Marsalis began laying the groundwork for this show more than two decades ago, when he relocated to Baltimore after earning his degree in photography from New York University's Tisch School for the Arts.

Fascinated by the stereotypes held by both those outside and inside the city limits, Marsalis began capturing candid - if not downright blunt - images of Baltimore's city life.

Eventually, he focused his efforts on his Belair-Edison neighborhood in east Baltimore city. And in 2004, his incessant snapping culminated in his first book "Tha Bloc: Words, Photographs and Baltimore in Black, White and Gray." It is from this book that Anacostia Museum's "Voices & Visions of Tha Bloc" came to be.

The exhibition takes the viewer on a circular path, from images of African-American girls striking their most diva-like poses to young boys toting guns to families strutting their Sunday best.

And the poetry and prose interjected between photographs makes the images seem to dance off the walls - their subjects playing and praying in a whirlwind all around you.

--Darona Williams (Express, July 26, 2007)