I was taking pictures of an abandoned house on Philetus Street in Cleveland in 2014. Suddenly a group of kids appeared and began to pose for the camera. This was the first time I had come across what i call Perppin. Some of it is anti-posing and some of it is trashing expectations. It’s a reference to the New York perp walk, where the alleged react to being exposed in public by a photographer. But covering your face is only part of it, which is about impromptu posing controlled by the subject without direction.
Houses with overgrown vegetation and boarded up is taken for granted around here. They grew up with half their neighborhood gone and continuing to disappear.
Who was Philetus? During the gilded age, it was trendy to use ancient Greek and biblical names. No one knows who he was except for one bad thing hed did. In the Second Epistle to Timothy, chapter 2. Paul names him alongside Hymenaeus and says their teaching is spreading “like gangrene.” That’s not metaphor-lite, it’s creeping dead flesh. On this street it’s creeping vegetation.
The Philetus Crew does their only straight pose.
Tuna, aka, Augustus Kendall had a block party to celebrate the 18th birthday of his son, Cameron. Tuna has a shop on 141st St. in Mott Haven that he restored into 1970s bodega.
As it turns out his son, along with his friends are masters of the Perp, and true to form, are under twenty years old. His father and his friends pose in more traditional poses, made popular in mid-town Manhattan and the Deuce in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuna’s creations are worn by all posing.
The Phelitus Crew’s neighborhood always looked like this. It’s natural, perhaps too natural with trees and plants growing over homes. And those Clevelanders, although they don’t kmow it, are really poor.
Perppin, 2025
Kendall, Cameron’s father in the middle.
Cameron on his eighteenth birthday at his father’s Made in Bodega, East 141st Street, Mott Haven.
On University Ave., Halloween, 2025 folks perp.
As you can see, it’s a matter of age, and has become a thing.