Contemporary photographers of Detroit
Here's a gallery of photos by seven contemporary Detroit photographers: "These seven artists have been working in the city as explorers, adventurers and pioneers for years to capture the city as it changes, evolves, devolves and transforms into something unbelievable, profound and heartbreaking. In the end they hope as a group to show Detroit as it is, not what it should be or what it was, but how it is. This in itself a provocative gesture as there are not many who feel content with the Detroit of today."
The shooters are Corine Smith, Mitch Cope, Clinton Snider, Mark Alor Powell, Antonio Gomez, Ingo Vetter and Scott Hocking; and Mitch Cope, who assembled the gallery, wants to do a book of these shots. I'd buy it.
7 CONTEMPORARY DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHERS (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
(Image: Mark Alor Powell )
Previously:
- Haunting photo-essay on rotting buildings in Detroit - Boing Boing
- James D. Griffioen's photos of Detroit, "the disappearing city ...
- Rotting textbook warehouse in Detroit - Boing Boing
- Detroit's SuperBowl bid faked the skyline - Boing Boing
- Artists buying cheap houses in Detroit - Boing Boing
- Edwardian croquet-game in the ruined shell of a Packard plant in ...
- Glemie Dean Beasley, urban raccoon hunter - Boing Boing
- Detroit houses selling for less than cars - Boing Boing
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Is that a warning to other plush characters to stay away ? Kind of disturbing.
HIPSTER GO HOME
Mark is an amazing Photographer - he was my college roommate - then made his way down to Mexico City. Check out his flickr - he's one of the world's best... I do believe.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/locaburg/
If you're in the Great Lakes area Cory, you really need to come by Detroit.
I've said it many times here before, living in the area all my life, we all know Detroit certainly has some impressively messed up and decaying areas. But on the flip side, I can point you to fantastically decaying areas of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Memphis, pretty much any large American city that had anything to do with manufacturing...and many who did not.
But I can also take you to some very nice areas of Detroit where you can walk through a brand new park that's several miles long, I can take you to the Detroit Jazz Festival at Hart Plaza along the waterfront. I can take you to the heart of the new city, the Campus Martius area where a festival or event of some kind happens almost every weekend. There are first class restaurants in the Greektown area. The list goes on.
My point is that it gets really tiring to see story after story which boils down to 'OMG Detroit is a ruin, look!'. I realize that 'Detroit Electronic Music Festival is the weekend!' doesn't grab BoingBoing headlines, but believe it or not, Detroit moves on.
@4
Ah, but Cory has been to Detroit. In fact, his visit is the reason I became aware of BoingBoing in the first place - he gave a moving guest lecture at the invitation of Dr. Steven Shaviro while I was a student at Wayne State University.
Like others, I have been skeptical about the recent talk of Detroit heading to hell in a handbasket. I found this website that will give you property values (list and sale prices, and a "price index") for different cities, separating each city into regions. So it becomes very easy to see which cities have extremely run-down sections.
Conclusion? Many cities have regions of very low property values, but from the cities I looked at, Detroit seems to have the most suppressed property values.
http://www.zillow.com/local-info/MI-Detroit-home-value/r_17762/
When they get around to making a movie out of Dhalgren, they have a perfect place to shoot. Detroit fuit, Bellona est....
@Spoonyfork & Atanguay & Axx, "Print the legend," dudes. Charts of real estate values, music festivals, etc., can't compete with a single one of those photographs. Sorry, Detroit got tagged as one of the poster cities for the New American Century, i.e., the post-American Century, and these photos don't exactly dispel the myth.
Detroit photography seems to have been incorporated into the current trend for apocalypse porn. Cormac McCarthy making Oprah's book list would appear to be the high water mark for the genre.
I really hate to be a total troll here, but I was rather let down by the technical skill of a good portion of these photographs. Some are ill-exposed and halfhazardly composed that hardly come off better than point-and-shoot.
That said, they offer a decent journalistic chronicle of what has happened, and what certainly will happen with a good deal of lower-middle class America. In vein with the complete negativity of this post, I hope some good photography comes out of it all.
Despite the fact that some of these shots are not technically perfect photography (as noted above) I am still amazed by them. They are beautiful for their candor. They serve a valuable purpose to show us the way things are, they ways in which things have changed, and the fact that there are still real, interesting, vibrant people living in Detroit. These photos are as valuable as the ones of folks today in the Ninth Ward. They show us not only a once great city in decay, but one in the process of changing into something completely different.
insertfingerhere @1:
A child died at that intersection. This is how families and friends memorialize the loss of a child's life at the hands of a vehicle's driver in Southeast Michigan. It is a very sad thing to see inspite of the nearly comical packing tape holding the critters in place.
atanguay @4:
What you said.
I don't know... this is pretty depressing looking at this. I have seen many photographers shoot Detroit in the worst angles possible. I suppose there is some beauty in those shots themselves. I know what they are trying to do but for somebody like me, living here, I see this reality too often. I am not really sure how beautiful it is... haha I think I would rather see some shots that are showing Detroit in a little bit more positive light. Maybe that way we would start looking at this city with hope instead of being constantly reminded of what it is.
I love BoingBoing's love for Detroit. I also love introducing people to Detroit for the first time. Maybe I'm biased since I've lived in southeast Michigan for my whole life minus four years, but there are only a handful of cities in the United States that really stand out. I think Detroit is one of them.
Everybody knows Detroit. Everybody seems to have some opinion of Detroit, whether they've been there or not. It's usually something about the violence or decay, but it's still a city implanted in everyone's minds.
I never lived in Detroit proper, but the house I grew up in and houses I've occupied since have all been within a mile or so of the famous dividing line between Detroit and the suburbs, 8 Mile. My grandparents lived in Hamtramck, a small city within the city known for its massive Polish population. My girlfriend grew up in southwest Detroit (Mexican Town) and I've spent a good amount of time there.
I'm still no Detroiter, but I love showing people the city--hell, I just showed my brother-in-law downtown Detroit for the first time last night when we saw Lewis Black at the Fillmore and ate at Fishbones in Greektown. I love showing them the good and the bad, and it all exists together. I love taking them around and showing them that people LIVE there, there are people ALIVE there.
These photos capture a lot of the dark beauty that is Detroit. We're used to it. We live among the lake-effect clouds. We live among the news reports. We live among the industries crumbling around us. But we keep on. That's Detroit.