Chuck Shacochis

ore than twenty years have passed since the release of John Waters’s film (1998), which tells the story of an aspiring photographer, played by Edward Furlong, whose deliciously gritty black-and-white images of the characters and happenings in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood catch the eye of a New York gallerist. Much hullabaloo follows—critics rave over his debut show; an arts writer calls his friends and family “culturally challenged” in the newspaper; his grandmother Memama appears on the cover of ; the Whitney Museum of American Art offers him a show, to be titled  ; and, eventually, the great and good of the New York art world end up partying in Baltimore, where Pecker decides to stage his own show. The film remains a cult favorite and one in a long line of movies that buoy the cliché that all photographers are eccentric if lovable outsiders.