Stranger leaves Baltimore photographer Devin Allen money in her will after his work moved her

Allen says the unexpected gift renewed his drive during a difficult year and will help fund a space for young artists in his community.

Devin Allen assumed the email was a scam. A woman he had never met, living more than a thousand miles away, had written him into her will.

It was real. Allen told WBAL-TV 11 that Tamara Baran’s partner, family and attorney reached out to let him know she had left him money. “We have never met,” he said. “I thought it was fake, but it wasn’t fake.”

Allen’s photographs have carried far beyond Baltimore. His images from the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death and later George Floyd’s landed on the cover of Time magazine, and a photo of his mother singing in her living room now sits in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. He has described his goal as starting difficult conversations and showing young people from West Baltimore that art can be a path forward.

Baran was one of the people that work reached. According to her longtime partner, she grew up in Detroit during the 1970s and 1980s before living in Charleston and later Utah.

She witnessed how people were mistreated because of their skin color, including by police, and was deeply angered by the killings of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and George Floyd. When she came across Allen’s photographs on Instagram in 2015, they affected her profoundly.

Her partner described someone who consistently sought out people being bullied or ignored and helped them be heard. The gift, the partner wrote, was likely Baran’s way of extending kindness and hope into a world she found cruel, even after leaving it.

The timing carried weight Allen had not expected. He told the station this year has been especially difficult, marked by the loss of his mother and caring for a grandmother living with dementia. Learning that a stranger had believed in his work enough to invest in it, he said, renewed his drive during a dark stretch.

“It takes a community,” Allen said, “and sometimes you don’t even really know where that community is at.”

He received a check of roughly $3,000 and signed the estate paperwork this week.

The money is going straight back into his roots. Allen plans to keep renovating his grandmother’s house, the home he grew up in, and is shaping it into a studio and art gallery.

Eventually, he wants it to become a place where young artists from his neighborhood can develop their own voices, the same kind of support Baran gave him without ever introducing herself.