It was love at first sight when Jewish artist Micah E. Wood first set foot on the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art as a high school student.
Sixteen years later, Wood, a native of Newport News, Virginia, now teaches at MICA and is still infatuated with his adopted hometown. In particular, he is passionate about Charm City’s music and arts scene.
A photographer and musician who previously worked at Creative Alliance, Wood. 33, is publishing a book of his archived photos featuring local band members in city spots that have special meaning for them.
“Scene Seen” (Co_Lab) — designed by Wood’s best friend, Baltimore native Christopher Chester — includes more than 200 photos of 85 bands taken by Wood between 2016 and 2024. The bands photographed include a mix of established ensembles like Dan Deacon and Pianos Become the Teeth, as well as emerging artists like Tomato Flower and Megafauna, the latter of whom is Jewish.
Other Jewish artists featured in the book include Ari Pluznik of Ari and the Buffalo Kings, Jonathan Birkholz of Super City, and Outcalls’ Britt Olsen-Ecker.
A release party for “Scene Seen” will be held Friday, Jan. 3, from 7-11 p.m. at Metro Baltimore, 1700 N. Charles Street.
Wood says that “Scene Seen” isn’t his first book of images depicting bands, but it is the first specific to local bands and to include archival material – “photos that made it so that when you flip back through [the book] years and years from now, there’s relevant information,” he says.
The book was funded in part by a grant from the Maryland Arts Council and published with assistance from Daniel Agee.
“Each page has the band, the band [members’] names, and when the photo was taken and what part of Baltimore the photo was taken in,” said Wood. “If it was taken inside, then what building within what neighborhood?”
Wood says he appreciates that the book contains at least several photos “that could never be recreated because Baltimore’s landscape is constantly changing.”
For example, Lindsey Jordan, the local indie singer-songwriter who goes by the name Snail Mail, appears in a photo taken outside of the Charles Village venue Ottobar. The building next door has since been demolished and replaced by a new structure.
Another artist asked to be photographed in front of a favorite tree near the Johns Hopkins University campus.
“Two months later, they cut it down,” says Wood. “So now that tree is immortalized in a book.”
Wood says “Scene Seen” was a collaborative process since he has “always tried to photograph people the way they wanted to be seen.”
Some but not all of the bands featured in the book wrote content accompanying their photos.
“About a fourth of the bands contributed writing, and we tried to get a range of age and genre and people from Baltimore or transplants,” says Wood. “You can kind of get this idea of the scene through these little stories and moments from these writers. Instead of being about any one band, it’s about the city that that fuels those bands, that inspires those bands.”
For information, visit sceneseen.myshopify.com/products/scene-seen-baltimore-band-portraits-2016-2024-preorder or Instagram.com/micahewood
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