“It was Fall, 1982, I was a sophomore at Wayne State University. I loved being at Wayne State, especially the photography department, where our classes met in a large old Arts and Crafts style house known as “680” for the address at 680 Putnam. I enrolled in Large Format Photography, taught by Mark Towner. We used Cambo 4x5 cameras, made of durable steel. I had been interested in capturing some of the architectural relics that I had grown up admiring: Michigan Central Station, Hudson’s Downtown Store (Hudson’s played a huge role in our family; My parents met while working at Hudson’s Northland, which was America’s first suburban shopping mall). The occasional bus trips that my mother treated me to, trip downtown on the Grand River Bus, during which the bus driver would shout out the names of the intersections and what was there (“Greenfield! Wards! Kresges! Federals!”) had given me a love of architecture. I focused on some of those monumental Grand River buildings that were gradually crumbling, such as the Riviera Theater and Ned’s Firestone. There were some buildings that I wished that I had photographed before their disappearance. (Example: the old Providence Hospital, which I remember seeing mid-demolition from the windows of the Grand River Bus). Perhaps that was a motivation for becoming a photographer.
So it was an easy choice what my subject matter would be for Mark Towner’s class: Detroit Architecture. (I was also inspired by a group of the graduate students, whose parties I occasionally crashed. They were documenting the destruction of Poletown for a new General Motors plant).
As I began the project, there were some problems to solve. There were certain buildings that were in the shadow of other buildings (example: The Peanut Butter Building on Grand Boulevard was almost entirely in the shadow of the General Motors Building, except very early in the morning. So I had to get up super early to get a good photo of it. I have vivid memories of my fingers getting colder and less responsive while handling the cold metal tripod and cold metal camera!.
Another result of working early was the emptiness of the streets, which of course emphasised the sense that we were in a city that was increasingly empty…(By the 1990s, half of the population had left!).
Working with a large format camera is a great problem solving experience that also teaches composition well, given that you have a large screen on which your image is projected. (Of course, the idea of viewing your image on a large screen is a constant in our lives now, but then? Not so much.
By the following year, I had abandoned the 4x5” camera for the convenience of my Pentax K1000 as I spent a year studying in Spain. I started morphing into a “people photographer” and upon returning to Wayne State and Detroit one year later, I joined the WSU daily student paper, (The South End) and set my sights on newspaper and eventually magazine work.
I did not use a large format camera again until the late 1990s, when I became a fan of a wonderful large format instant film called Polaroid 55.(A nod to photographer Manny Crisotomo, who turned me on to Type 55. I purchased another 4x5” camera.
I continued to make mostly portraits, but occasionally would make a photo of an epic building like the former Studebaker plant on Piquette Street after an enormous fire in the summer of 2005. Then I moved to California and editorial photography assignments were mostly gone, so I started doing large format work again with the Wet Plate Collodion Process, again mostly people centered. However in 2009, Sherry Hendrick, who with her partner Mick Vranich operated an art gallery in their large garage (Alley Culture) invited me to be in a landscape show, even though I didn’t do landscapes ( I grudgingly agreed to do some landscape for that show) So today I have come full circle and I am making large format landscapes. It’s been an amazing fun circular journey!”
The reception will take place on July 9th from 5pm-9pm