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Alpha The Wolf Holds a Line at a Shuttered Institution for "Perimeters"

January 10, 2025, 9:00 AM CT · 2 min read

All black. Chain link. Boarded windows.

Catalogued in the same January 2025 batch as Bad Sushi and Seeing Red, Perimeters is seven frames on the fenced lawn of a shuttered brick institutional building - boarded windows, white pillars, a chain-link line running the whole background under flat grey light. The building is the former Bordeaux Mental Hospital in North Nashville - built in 1901 as the Riverside Sanitarium by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, one of Tennessee's first psychiatric facilities to treat Black patients under Jim Crow, closed in 2001 after malpractice investigations. Six brick buildings across 16 acres, still standing and unrestored.

One head-to-toe black look carries it: a velvet durag with long braided ties, gold-tinted round glasses, a long trench over a black tee and tennis chain, strapped cargo trousers printed with white lettering, heavy boots.

Alpha The Wolf standing on mown grass with his head bowed and both arms hanging loose, a black trench open over a black tee and white bead chain, a red brick building with rows of dark windows behind him

He works the boundary. Crouched on the pavement at the fence, standing mid-lawn with his head bowed, drifting to the edge of the grass to study a pair of glasses held in both hands. The building never opens up - rows of dark windows, plywood over the lower floor, the columns of a portico blurred beyond the wire.

The all-black tactical layering is a catalogue constant - the printed cargo webbing, the chest rigs, the Fabric Of The Universe lettering worn on stage for Assault Ops. Eighteen months on, the same register walked straight into standing floodwater for Flooded.

Alpha The Wolf turned to look off to his right, a black trench open over a tennis chain and black tee, tactical cargo trousers printed with white lettering and hung with buckled pouches

Only a couple of frames give the camera a level look; the durag tie hangs straight down across one eye in most of them.

Alpha The Wolf standing mid-lawn facing the camera with a durag tie hanging across one eye, an iced tennis chain over a black tee, black strapped cargo pants with a zip pouch

The last frames turn his back to the camera - the shoulder yoke of the coat filling the frame, the ties trailing over one shoulder, the collar up around his neck.

Alpha The Wolf photographed from behind standing on the grass with his arms at his sides, the shoulder yoke of the long black coat filling the frame, a chain-link boundary across the background

What "Perimeters" means

A perimeter is the line you hold - the edge of a property, the limit of a territory, the distance you keep. The shoot puts one figure on the boundary of an abandoned institution and never lets him cross it or leave it; the fence is the subject as much as he is. In the wolf's telling the pack has ground to defend and the watching never stops, and a shut-down building behind chain link is exactly the kind of edge he would post up on - claiming a place the city already gave up on.