Detroit Wonderland

This photo was taken in the old Packard Plant in Detroit.  The factory once sprawled over 35 acres and today it’s a crumbling shell where lichen and trees have taken hold.  Endless corridors that once flowed with rivers of shiny new parts and pieces are now filled with broken glass, plaster, cement, steel and wood.

We snuck in with Julia Solis, a German-born Brooklyner and urban explorer who spends a good deal of time haunting the ruins of Detroit and taking pictures, many of which she’s published on her site in a series called Detroit Wonderland.

We wandered for a couple of hours and ended up in this room  — a room with a view where the factory wall had fallen completely away, leaving a gaping, spectacular hole several stories up.  I plunked down in the old car seat, which could have just as easily been a movie seat, and took it all in. For me it was the perfect ending, a reminder of the way moving cars and moving pictures induce the same desire to project ourselves into space, to be anywhere but here.

Check out Julia’s other photo diaries of secret journeys through the New York subway, East German hospitals, the Paris catacombs and my particular favorite: abandoned theaters.

Tales from the Motor City

Just back from the Motor City where I spent most of my time marveling at and taking pictures of the ruins — the Michigan Theater and the Packard Plant stand out — not to mention all the boarded up store fronts, foreclosed homes and tiny, lone houses surrounded on all sides by urban prairie.

Detroit has been awash in the media spotlight lately, mostly gloom and doom about the failing car industry, unemployment and worthless real estate. And yes, that’s all there. But one afternoon while we were visiting, we stood talking to our friend Blake, an urban farmer/artist/carpenter, in the backyard of his house in the Near East Side.  He had us peek over the fence into his neighbor’s lot next door, a huge expanse full of green crops and cherry trees.  In winter, they flood the same space with water and it becomes a hockey rink.  Bucolic is the word that kept floating through my head. And even though Blake says there’s gunfire at night, I keep thinking about that green field.

I’ve been following photographers who shoot Detroit. James D. Griffoien otherwise known as “Dutch,” runs a blog called Sweet Juniper (named after his daughter) that chronicles his life in the Motor City.  He moved to Detroit from SF with his wife Wood a few years back, two kids in tow, to live in a Mies van der Rohe townhouse.  They’re both lawyers and he has subsequently turned writer/photographer/stay-at-home dad.

His blog features “tidy little stories” of seemingly disparate things like fatherhood, abandoned buildings, found photos and DIY craftiness all delivered in an endearingly surly tone.  And of course some amazing photos. Check out the series on his family’s weekly haul of produce from Saturday’s Eastern Market tagged “detroitisnotafooddesert” — a humorous, colorful, luscious-as-a-Dutch-still-life portrait of food politics and family. Or his photo of every house on one street in Detroit that he stitches together in one long and lonely panoramic shot: Ghost Street.

If you’re planning on going to the Motor City, check out Sweet Juniper’s travel guide to Detroit on Design*Sponge.

Lines in the Sand

SF photographer Sean McFarland’s Polaroid landscapes are streaked with movement, traced with the remnants of a human or a natural footprint — whether it’s a twister touching down, a small biplane scuttling above the earth or a sentimental starburst of light in an ocean sunset. His night scenes have the otherworldy dislocation of a day-for-night shot. McFarland just won the 2009 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.

Suburbia

Doug Rickard (or dR as he calls himself) has gathered a striking collection of essays and photos on his website American Suburb — everyone from Eggleston and the Bechers to Todd Hido, Mike Brodie, Larry Sultan, David Maisel and lesser-known artists. The theme that runs through it all  is the loneliness and alienation of that idealized and much-maligned place, the American suburb.  “There can be beauty there and yes there is a feeling of safety there but often under the surface things are boiling and rumbling, at the foundation things are ready to fall apart.”  In the photographers he choses to highlight, look for an uneasy mix of the sublime and the sinister.

The Last Days of W.

Stephen Wirtz Gallery is showing Alec Soth’s photo series, “The Last Days of W.“  I wrote the exhibit up for Flavorpill:

As W. heads back to Crawford for good, he leaves behind memories both pathetic and dire — flying size 10s, bungled phrases, and premature Mission Accomplished banners underscore the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Katrina. Now, with pitch-perfect irony, photographer Alec Soth documents #43’s legacy, capturing the shell-shocked American landscape he leaves behind. Lonely images of Osama Bin Laden piñatas, pawn shops, homeless camps called Purgatory, gull-infested landfills, and dying rustbelt towns evoke a twilight zone where, as Soth says, there’s no telling if it’s “dusk or dawn.”

Twilight Zone

Pearls often wash up on the dashboard of my blog; among all the traffic data, I often look to see where people are coming from.  A photographer in Portland, Missy Prince, linked to my blog from her photo diary.  With the lush title Now It’s Dark, Prince’s journal features a steady stream of muted, dusky images that have the golden tint of old snapshots.  Right now a lot of wintry scenes — snow on cedars and awnings, empty swingsets and dormant summer lawn chairs.

Everything in Our Apartment

This might look like a page from a J. Crew catalog, but in fact it’s a clever photographic experiment called “Sort” that appeals to the collector, the organizer as well as the photographer in me. Not to mention I love any excuse to group things visually by color (see Etsy, lynda, Crayola).

Paho Mann

Paho Mann, a Texas-based photographer, took pictures of everything in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend Leigh, cataloging his own consumer tendencies. He then uploaded the images to a website and grouped them by object size, material, color, location, owner, use type, price, etc. Using dropdown filters, visitors can “rummage” through the “apartment,” peeking into closets and rooms, building a vague sense of who these people are by what they own.

Behind the Scenes

Taryn Simon’s photo project, “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” answers questions most of us wouldn’t even know to ask.

Taryn Simon

Does Playboy publish a Braille version of its magazine? Yes. Did the CIA use Abstract Expressionism to advance pro-American thought abroad? Perhaps. What happens to all the forbidden fruit brought into the US on foreign flights? The answer lies in this photo of African yams, Andean potatoes and Bangladeshi cucurbit plants piling up like a Flemish still life gone bad.

Simon explains in a footnote: “All items in the photograph were seized from the baggage of passengers arriving in the U.S. at JFK Terminal 4 from abroad over a 48-hour period. All seized items are identified, dissected, and then either ground up or incinerated. JFK processes more international passengers than any other airport in the United States.”

She documents the off-limits — cryogenics labs, quarantine rooms and nuclear waste facilities — with a quiet clinical, abstraction that throws the illicit nature of these scenes into sharp relief.

Tear Down This Wall

With elections around the corner, it seemed appropriate to bring up Swiss artist Simone Niquille whose photographic mashups scramble the images and discourse of politics.

Her altered photos offer degraded versions of historic moments, once filled with import but now just static memories where the words and gestures of politicians break up and disappear.

In this photo of Reagan giving his “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin, Niquille took the first image result on a Google search for Reagan. She converted both the image and the words of the speech into two separate hexadecimal files, then combined the two hexadecimal files to create one new one, then converted the combined hexadecimal file back to an image. Whew. Sounds complex but the result is striking.

Check out her interpretations of speeches by Malcolm X, FDR, JFK, DeGaulle and more.

Bringing the War Home

In her unsettling photo collages Martha Rosler combines domestic images with snapshots of war. 60s housewives pull the blinds back on soldiers in trenches while teenagers with cell phones yammer as explosions go off behind them. The New York Times recently published a video slide show of her work.