Exploring a New Diet

I have not been out recently on a photo trek…and feel I am wandering in a liminal zone. For years trekking into Detroit for my style of images was like shooting fish in a barrel – butt somebody let the fish out. On the very first day, actually at 7 AM in the morning, I ventured off into Detroit for the first time in years. The month before I purchased my very first digital camera. It was a hunk of shit. But I needed something to post on a new photo/art sharing site that was just erupting online, Deviant Art. I was looking for something a bit different than a close-up shot down the strings of my guitar, and I wasn’t too enthusiastic about photographing my shoes even though, to quote street photographer Garry Winnogrand, “I photograph to see what the world looks like photographed” but I decided to pass on the shoes. Instead – I thought Detroit might be interesting, as the Motown is from whence I hail. With that creepy Kodak camera in tow, I headed into the city.

It was like the movie “The Wizard of Oz” when the black and white film suddenly transformed into brilliant color! Except – my experience was a reversal of that. I started out around Woodward and East Seven Mile Road and it was like a ghost town, a bombed out war zone. Busted windows, glass everywhere, breached abandoned buildings, tags painted on every available surface, a few burned out areas – my brain went numb. I tooled around a bit and felt like I really did not belong here, that I was violating someone’s, the city’s, privacy. I drove around a bit n main streets and things did not improve and as I headed out I decided I would not return and my second choice of ‘something to shoot’ would have to default to the cemetery. Besides, I had a feeling that if I shot in Detroit, she might shoot back.

I posted those images anyway because I had nothing else – and comments rolled in. People were shocked and even people from this area who travel Detroit’s main roads had not ‘scene’ the sorts of images I posted. So I went a second time, then a third time and before I knew it, I was addicted. I wanted to expose living conditions in Detroit. There was a lot of hanky panky going on down at city hall and the city was in crisis mode.

I spent the next fifteen plus years roaming Detroit’s worst neighborhoods. A new sheriff came to town around 2015 and things started to change. It was make-over. Clean-up. Abandoned homes and businesses were disappearing as in demolition. Yes – it was a demolition derby! Messed up business fronts were repaired and all abandoned buildings received a paint job of a dull, boring uniform color: Graffiti be gone. Yes, the downtown and midtown regions are like a new city and some of the neighborhoods were not included in the gentrification plans, at least not yet. I am sweet and sour. I have nothing to photograph! But I certainly want Detroit to survive and thrive. And besides – with the energy reversed and repair replaced despair – I have nothing to photograph, at least in Detroit.

I am still hungry and that’s where my new diet comes in. Target practice…I need a new focal point for my photography. Lurking in the background of my Detroit work, I am drawn to contemplative photography and the concept of the between – of liminal space areas – appeals.

So that is where I am at right now.

Bridging the Gap

Spring is here (even though I saw snowflakes yesterday) and all those powerful forces of Nature are surging, thrusting up through the soil – and I am feeling horny to renew my photographic adventures.

Post Pandemic Blues

Raw – stream of unconscious writing…

Am I the only one deeply affected by the pandemic?  I mean – photographically?  I am sure not!

I am a nomad.  I roam.  I have no space I call “home.”  I have a place I live, eat, etc.  I realized recently that I never decorate my space.  Why don’t I hang photographs?  My own?  I have seen them already and am working on a new batch. 

Perhaps someone else’s photos? 

I think I am going to start taping 4×6 photos around my living space.  My own.  I do have some favorites I suppose.

Usually I am out somewhere or other doing something or other.  It used to be easier but the world is changing so rapidly.  Music.  I hung around indie music shops, perhaps picked up a few CDs that sounded interesting, or at very least had interesting covers.  One series by an artist that really caught my eye was a 4AD performer called the Red House Painters.  Definitely outlier music.  And the cover art, BW photos was delicious.  That was a long time ago, when I could still go into Repeat the Beat, Harmony House, or I think there was another shop called Neptune Records perhaps? And browse the selection.  However I read a year or so ago that the singer had some serious legal issues.  That didn’t change the CD art but it did add an interesting slant on some of his music.  It always amazes me how little we really know about one another.  OR how much we know about ourselves.  You tell me about you – I tell you about me.  But what am I telling you about me?  Perhaps the same that you are telling me about you:  stories. 

Fables. Fiction expressed with the belief that it is real.

Another hang out was bookstores, new and used,  Fortunately used bookstores are still hanging in there but Amazon has done a real number of retail new bookstores. Borders died before Amazon took over which was really unfortunate because I loved that chain.  Great magazines!  I was visibly shaken when they locked their doors.  Two weeks!  There are a few still surviving.  But for how long?  I like books.  My eyes hurt looking at a computer screen for long periods.  Besides – I refuse to purchase digital books.  I don’t want to feed into that system, supporting theft.   Books cost to produce.  Digital books only require a source copy and the rest is all profit.  Huge profit. 

Fuck them. 

And of course there is photography.  That kept me busy for years, mostly heading down into Detroit early in the morning, two or three times a week, going into the some of grittiest areas for the types of images I wanted to record.  Detroit had turned into a real dangerous beast.  I think when the auto industry abandoned the area in search of bigger profits it signed the death verdict for the city.  Profits.

You might think I am anti-profits.  Nope.  However I feel like the economic system is now a big Monopoly game – and we are playing in the later stages of the game where all the properties are gone, rules changed so the player is not limited to one hotel.  Running around the track is like swimming in a small pool of starved sharks, with unbandaged open wounds.

So then the pandemic hit.  Of what was left of the sorts of places I frequented – well, they all closed down for a period.  I  stayed indoors for the first time in my life.  It was novel at first but then it started to wear me down.  I  wore myself down…with permission.  I hardly went out hunting for images, add to that horrendous turmoil in my personal life.  One I saw my cameras sitting in a straw basket, in cased, where I usually kept them and remembered how alive I felt when I was on a photo safari.  I had moved and Detroit was now a fifteen minute ride to even the outer most border.  And the city changed, for the better.  Gentrification was really making a difference in mid and downtown. 

I noticed something very strange about my motivations when I left my space…I was destination driven.  With so many businesses closed during periods of the pandemic – when I went out, it was for a reason other then ‘just because…’  I forced myself out the door and struggled with indecision about where to go next.  How strange – it was like my thinking process was in prison, without the possibility of parole.  It really felt that way.

I am out now, not as much as before and my mind is cluttered rather than more open spaced as it used to be when I was roaming for things that caught my eye.  It is satisfying but in a different way. 

Actually the different way is way different.

Back in the Saddle

Wow – where does the time go? If I’m not careful – I’ll be pushing daisies soon enuff.

A friend brought up the topic of how the pandemic has created a strong sense of un-focus. I feel it. The last few years have been mostly out of focus as well…my cameras mostly drew dust. However I am feeling my urge to create growing again. I trekked to Detroit the other day for the first time in a while; I’m still struggling with the changes in the city, as she continues to improve – at least in certain financially viable areas! Midtown and downtown are hot – or at least were before the virus.

It all feels like a sci-fi horror novel, maybe written by John Brunner?

My eyes have dried out. I have to revitalize my vision. What I need is to reset what catches my attention – and I don’t quite know how to do that. “Something” draws my attention to pick up what I find interesting. I’m sure it’s complicated. Decay and growth before it turned the corner from decay have been a filter for me, as well as non sequitur. Things that don’t fit. I suppose I don’t fit which is what drives my visions.

I accept the consequences of not fitting.

Where will my photo travels take me? I’m not sure but I do feel a sense of excitement.

Whoopie! Let the games begin…

Flickr Stagnation

Hello Flickr People

I’m still here. I have been following the guidelines set down by the governor of my state, which means I have largely been holed up in my humble abode watching daddy-long-leg spiders romp across my window blinds.

I did take a few runs through Detroit, which is what I used to be notoriously known for when I started Flickr in 2005, a year after I began roaming the streets of Detroit’s decimated neighborhoods.

I decided to document life in Detroit’s ravaged neighborhoods, long before other large industrial areas joined the ranks.

Detroit is changing. The mid and downtown areas have been completely transformed: it is stunning, a complete makeover. Yuppie condos are sprouting at an alarming rate in the downtown area. Living down there has become fashionable with those gainfully employed millennials not living in their parent’s basements.

However, many of the neighborhoods are still in dire straits. Whole neighborhoods are abandoned, rows and rows of empty, boarded houses. There is an occasional occupied house here and there, someone who probably lacks the resources to move.

Thousands of the 80,000 abandoned properties have been demolished. And those still standing have been boarded up and painted drab colors. The whole look is boring (from this photographer’s eye.) I am pleased that Detroit is growing, or at least was growing before the pandemic. The pandemic was brutal on the residents as Detroit was one of the hot spots for the virus.

I am not ‘seeing’ photographs; I am not interested in taking shots that would be suitable in a out-of-towners Instagram page.

My viewers have done a complete flip-flop; those interested in my Detroit work have abandoned me. Sigh. I used to have a hard time getting views on my other styles of images, like the minimalism that has captured me. But now my Detroit shots are of little interest…which is why you haven’t seen new stuff lately.

I will be back. Maybe I need to nurture an interest in the nesting habits of daddy long leg spiders. Or maybe take a shot of the inside of my freezer; William Eggleston got away with that.

Why not?

I still visit Flickr regularly and enjoy watching the images roll by. I need to wake up my inner photographer out of his deep sleep induced by cabin fever.

It’s Been a Long Time…

I started photographing Detroit on a chilly mourn, the first day of the year in 2004 at 7 AM.  I hadn’t been in the city for a very long time, years actually.  I knew nothing about the conditions, the politics.  A lot was going on in the U$A back then, with the bleeding of work related to the auto industry (Detroit was once considered the automotive capital of the world – well, of the U$A at least.)  The good paying manual labor jobs that gave many Detroiters the good life left town, leaving the city in shambles.

I had re-entered the magical mystical world of photography, having just purchased my first digital camera.  It had been decades for me and the promise of editing software on my computer was that carrot dangling before the hidden artist within.

What I found in the neighborhoods of the city shocked me, scared the shit right out of me.  How could Detroit have turned into the ravages of war on the streets?  My first impulse was to get the hell out of dodge ASAP.  I stood out like a white guy in a black city and from the looks of the terrain, I thought some residents might not look on me with favor.  The citizens were living in abject poverty and I immediately felt the frustration and anger by those economically trapped in the city.  I reluctantly posted a few pictures on a newly forming art sharing website called DeviantArt.  I had just joined (and they had just emerged on the “seen”) and posted a few images.  Comments rolled in immediately – so I decided to try another trek and soon it became a weekly triple crown event for me, like a religion;  I wanted to expose conditions  in the neighborhoods because when I started this project, we were in a state of transition in America and life in Detroit was still a secret to most.

Detroit has changed from that frigid mourn on the first day of 2004.

Under the Influence

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

My life is complicated and I do not have so much time for myself lately, which has added some pressure to finding a new focus for my work as I have pretty much divorced myself from roaming Detroit, at least as a main visual topic.  For years I would get in the car and go into automatic mode, trying to decide which Detroit neighborhood to start with, often changing course along the way.  It was automatic.  Detroit or bust.

Deciding to quit has left a void.  I have spent hours pouring over monographs by various photographers and sometimes am inspired by what I view.  My initial plunge into Detroit in 2004 was preceded by spending time with Walker Evans’ photos.  I have a few collections of his work and seeing it was definitely a boost in the initial stages.   His photos were like starter fluid, but once I launched, I was on my own.

Another photographer who has greatly influenced me is Ralph Meatyard.  However, in his case, I was already photographing broken dolls and other macabre visions before realizing that he focused on that subject matter, collected in a wonderful collection of doll and mask images.

William Eggleston is a huge influence on me.  When I sit down with his work, I walk away looking at everything differently.  I can’t say that about many other photographers.  His work embraces me in a very special way.  He has a special way of seeing.  I have a video about him and there is a scene where he is driving with his son and they spot a small abandoned house which they stop and enter.  The film shows him focusing on a few images and then a still shot of his photo pops up.  There are a few images from that scene that seem so obviously in need of being photographed, after the fact.

I have a number of Eggleston’s collections which I do not view all that often because I am so heavily influenced when I enter his space.

Todd Hido hit my radar a few months back.  His gritty images caught my attention.  I had seen articles about his night houses in various photo magazines before.  His work is mostly out of print and expensive, so when I found an Aperture publication, a workshop series, by Hido, I picked it up.  It was a good read and it got me thinking quite a bit.  The book includes quite a few of his photos, too, a poor man’s overview of his work.  Mr. Hido had some good practical advice and it hit me as down to earth and not the sort of thinking of someone who is pretending to be artistic.  His photos are very honest and capture a feeling.  I recently posted an image in Flickr that was definitely one that occurred to me after viewing Hido’s work, and something he said in his book (always go back and take the picture when it occurs) was the reason I went back and got this one, and I am pleased that I did.  There is just something about it that causes me to think of it, that barren white garage in the foreground blocking most of the back of the house, both painted sort of a dirty white, probably in need to a fresh coat of paint to get it up to suburban standards.

Before I ventured into Detroit for photos, I was heading down a particular path of imagery, of focusing on shapes and colors in a particular way, influenced in part by my interest in metaphysics.  Detroit happened and I left it behind.  Perhaps now is a good time to revisit that mind set.

But, as I said, my life is complicated now.

You Are Now Leaving Detroit City Limits

My photographic interests are now and have always been quite varied.  Viewing my Flickr gallery, you might have the impression that I mostly photograph images in Detroit, tossing in a few cemeteries to the mix as well.  And maybe some damaged dolls or mannequins.  Don’t forget some Nature shots as well.  However, it is mostly the Detroit stuff that people remember.  I have attempted in the past to break away from featuring so much Detroit but view count for non-Detroit images usually tell me to stick to Motown.

Detroit is changing, cleaning up quite a bit.  Housing are getting demolished at the speed of a rapidly spreading fire.  As I venture into various sections of Detroit, I have developed a fondness, a friendship, with certain sites, particular abandoned buildings.  Driving by them, seeing them standing, is like waving to a friend.

“Hi.  How’s it going?”

But my friends, my landmarks, are disappearing.  Very few are still standing.  That is probably due to the fact that I am drawn to the more noticeable and flamboyant of decayed properties, the eye sores.

The bottom line (we seem to like those bottom lines) is that while Detroit is not becoming unfriendly, she is becoming a stranger…to me…and my cameras.  Last month I spent a few days roaming without stopping to capture more than a few images.  My kind of shot has become quite scarce.

Detroit is healing, so they say.  The business community is investing a lot of money in the city.  Investments require returns.  As I already stated, abandoned houses are disappearing faster than a speeding bullet.  However, the jobs aren’t there: I don’t think that is a Detroit-only issue.  I observe the inequality of wealth in Amerika, see the shift in benefits to the working man go into the bank accounts of the CEOs and stock holders, and I don’t see that problem of the massive gap in wealth changing any time soon.  We live in incredible times.  And without good paying jobs, crime in Detroit grows.  I don’t know if the statistics support what I see, if crime is truly up or down, but every morning I check local sites for reports on the latest shootings and carjackings.  And there is such news nearly every day, crimes in the same neighborhoods in which I harvest pictures. I believe that if good jobs were available, jobs with livable incomes, crime would not be a problem in the city.

Back to that bottom line, my photographic focus is shifting and Detroit is becoming more blurred.  My very first impulse for heading into Detroit was to find something ‘interesting’ to photograph, and when I sensed what was happening, I felt a need to show people what was going on in the city.  The cleaner look to the city is distracting from the true story, but as I already stated, it is not a Detroit-only story.

While reading an Aperture workshop publication, Todd Hido’s “On Landscapes, Interiors, and the Nude,” a chapter on when a project is over caught my eye.  He said you know when you are done with a project when you no longer get out of the car (or roll down the window) or get your camera out of the bag to take that picture.  It struck me at that instant that I am finished shooting Detroit.  There is still a story in Detroit but it has become invisible and I do not enjoy chasing ghosts.  I guess that is bad news for me at Flickr because the Detroit shots keep people coming back to my gallery.  I will continue to visit the city on occasion, but not at least twice a week, every week. My mission is complete and I need to move on. Detroit has been an obsession for nearly twelve years now and I really want to obsess on other things. I want to explore fresh ideas.

I only hope that you continue to view my work, and I continue to feel inspired by your visits to continue posting work.  I must say my romance with Flickr was seriously damaged a few years ago when Yahoo began reconstructing the site.  It isn’t bad now, but I think a lot of really excellent photographers left during the dust storm of changes.  I know I did, for a while.  However, I came back because I could not find anything else. But the magic is gone…it disappeared about two years ago.

Settling for something is very different than actively pursuing it with hope and dreams.

Flicked Off

The Righteous Brothers are singing my theme regarding my feelings about Flickr…I lost that loving feeling.

Over a year ago Flickr did a makeover that was not especially camera-photo friendly.  I stopped posting a few months and took my photos elsewhere, but that didn’t work out.  After Flickr took a few steps back and reinstated a site that was a little less social-media-friendly, I came back.  But I left my heart in San Francisco.  Well, Detroit.  During that time that Yahoo/Flickr is a corporation and their goal is about profits, I realized that I no longer fit their demographics of the audience they wanted to please.  I also knew they’d be chasing social-media again.  So when they did just that this spring, I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Yahoo/Flickr.  My photographic interests are quite varied, from urban to cemetery, to vernacular, to abstract and let’s not leave out those macabre dolls and mannequins.  However, what you wanted to see was Detroit, and more Detroit.  After 10-1/2 years, I was burned out on Detroit.  And besides, the city is really in the process of cleaning up and the Detroit Ive posted for these past years is no longer there.  And then there’s the recent spike in violence, carjacking and shootings.  I’d be in the city stuck at a light and nightmares of how easily someone could jump out from the bushes with gun in hand and take my car, my cameras, and possibly my life.  Over these past years I haven’t felt that way.

So I don’t know where my photography is going.  It’s not as much fun.  I’m at a loss for projects.

I do have a lot more time for other things, but I miss my passion.

Flick On – Flick Off

I seem to make rash decisions this time of year, for reasons unknown to me.

A few days ago it just seemed like the right thing to do, posting some new images on Flickr with the intention of keeping them up.  My principles have not changed regarding all the changes Flickr inflicts upon us, regardless of how we feel.  I realize Yahoo is a corporation and their goal is fatten their bottom line.  With technology constantly changing, with the advent of acceptable quality images from smart phones and less dependence on digital cameras, I again find myself in a group of die-hard fans of technology that is apparently moving to the curb, waiting to be picked up on Friday by the trash collectors.  I still like books, the kid that fill up the bookshelves, and CDs, and having my own copy of movies.

So I am as curious as some of you might be, regarding if I’ll stay at Flickr.  The term that causes me to choke is “beta,” an Orwellian term meaning ‘we are changing the way we do things here and we are giving you a brief adjustment period before we impose it on you.  Bend over.’

I do like the people at FLickr and when I moved my activity over to Zenfolio, I failed to realize how isolated I was from the people who might be drawn to my work.

I am back for now, but I do have one foot out the door.