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Ghost hunters

July 14, 2010 in Meditations | 3 comments

Before Sunday, I’m pretty sure I’d never taken a picture of Michigan Central Station.

But let’s backtrack.

Summer is the season for having friends in town. This weekend we entertained a friend of mine from college and his lovely bride-to-be. Eli’s from Northern Michigan, and he’s seen plenty of Detroit before, including once with me, almost six years ago, when all I knew how to do in Detroit was ride the People Mover, drive past the Station (and back then, Tiger Stadium) and eat at New Hellas in Greektown.

Before I had ever set foot in one of Detroit’s mouldering towers of famous decay, Eli used drive out to abandoned houses in the slum-pastoral outskirts of Beloit, Wisconsin and clamor around. Once I went with him. I fished out a down vest in an early-’80s duck-hunt palette, took it home and washed it a couple of times, and wore it faithfully for the next four years. Here I am sporting it in an abandoned barn Eli took us to near his family’s home in Burdickville:

Pretty sharp, right?

Now we’re all grown up. Eli and I are both getting married soon. (Eli’s getting married on a GOAT FARM. GOAT. FARM. Why didn’t I have that idea?) Eli still rustles around in old empty houses. I mostly sit around at home writing about how I feel kind of funny about old empty old houses (or newspaper offices, or blighted barns).

And the empty old thing that makes me feel funniest of all? It’s definitely Michigan Central.

But after we went to Belle Isle (where we saw, by the way, this incredible Black-Crowned Night Heron, who showed up at the koi pond at feeding time:)

And after we went to Grand Trunk for Michigan craft beers on draft, and Sala Thai in Eastern Market, and after I stepped away to pee, I came back to our table and heard Scott explaining the allure of the Station to our visitors. So off we went to see it.

I think maybe I spent so long obsessing over Detroit as an abstract idea, and so long adoring the Station for, you know, that giant, toothless, Rome-recalling Beaux-Arts metaphor of civilization’s decline that it is, that today I want to forget I was ever that person.

The Train Station was it for me, a suburban teenager in love with the idea of Detroit, a kid who was genuinely curious about the city but never managed to get much deeper or more deviant than taking bad black-and-white photos of the houses around my dad’s factory and sneaking into 5th Avenue at Comerica Park to see some lame blues band when I was underage.

Now that I am all grown up and drink legitimately at decent bars and think I might know a thing or two, the Train Station has become this place for people who don’t get it. It’s a secret place that used to be yours and now everyone goes there. Time started publishing photo essays about it and then people started asking questions like “Why don’t you buy one of those $1 houses I heard about?” or “Hey, wanna hear this great idea that might save Detroit?” and you never wanted to see a photograph of Michigan Central ever again.

This, of course, is nonsense, and unfair. There is nothing and nowhere like the Train Station. I have spent a lot of time this year trying to be less unfair about Detroit. To myself and to others. For God’s sake, it’s just a city people live in.

So this weekend I let myself take some pictures of the Train Station.

At first I was concerned. Earlier in the day, Eli’s fiancee told us that in all fairness, and for all our effort to show how people get Detroit wrong, she genuinely felt like Detroit was really, truly falling apart. We tried to leap to the city’s defense, but unfortunately a bum on the corner started shooting up heroin at that exact moment, and our argument was moot.

But the Train Station gave us its best. A gang of kids on bicycles rode up and asked us what the building was and if it was haunted.  Someone on the roof waved down at them and they shouted, “WHO WOULD GO IN THERE? ISN’T IT HAUNTED? IT LOOKS SCARY!” They eventually concluded that the people inside the buildings were probably ghost hunters. With cameras.

We said, “Yes, we’re sure they have cameras.”

And in some ways, they were probably ghost hunters, too.

Just then, we heard a float of brass. A man showed up from inside the Station and played a little trumpet serenade at the central door. (For some reason he was also holding aloft a big sweep broom.)

So this picture doesn’t feel weird to me, although at first glance it still gives me a twinge. (“Oh, hello! We just drove in from out of town to see some devastation! Here, take our picture!”)

It felt like the way photos began. Here. Here we were. We saw this guy playing a trumpet and kids on bikes.

And the next time I see it, it will remind me of Michigan Central as a sunset playground, full of music and ghost hunters, object of awe for careening kids on bicycles, not decrepit symbol of bygone, forgotten city.

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Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company

January 6, 2010 in History | No comments

Have you ever seen those old postcards — I tend to find them crammed in shoeboxes at antique stores — with luridly hued landscapes or blush-tinted street scenes and historical landmarks — photographs that almost look like rigid little paintings?

amsterdam

Dam Square, Amsterdam. Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1900

There’s a good chance they were made in Detroit.

In 1896, The Detroit Publishing Company acquired the exclusive American rights to PHOTOCHROM (uh, caps lock emphasis mine, because it is my new favorite name of a thing), a Swiss-patented process for making color lithographs from black-and-white photo negatives. Before PHOTOCHROM, photographs were colored by hand; color lithography was faster and produced more consistent results than hand-coloring or early color film. And it was so much sexier than black and white!

In a stroke of great serendipity for the partners of the Detroit Publishing Company, Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act in 1898, which allowed private publishers to produce their own postcards. They were so cheap and so beautiful, and business boomed for the Detroit Publishing Company, which sent its photographers and dealers around the world by rail and sea to take photographs and buy negatives from other photographers willing to sell their wares.

niagra in winter

Niagra in Winter, American Falls, New York. Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1906

Photography, of course, was revolutionary, but I’d never really thought of postcards as a milestone in publishing until working on this post. It makes so much sense, though: a penny or two, and you’ve got a tiny — but resplendent — work of art in your hands. Photography was the window on the world; the postcard brought the world to your mailbox.

atlantic city

Looping the Loop, Atlantic City. Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1901.

Because I still haven’t bought a decent pair of winter boots, and because I don’t really like going outside in the cold, I spent a few hours in a substantive virtual exhibition on the Detroit Publishing Company presented by The Henry Ford. It’s a little dated as digital exhibitions go, but it’s still a delightful and comprehensive introduction to the history of the business, and naturally it’s full of more than a hundred great photographs and lithographs of street life, nature, architecture, transportation and pretty things from all over the world at the turn of the 20th century.

moonlight constantinople

Moonlight Over Constantinople, Turkey. Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1905

Most of the Detroit Publishing Company’s original negatives belong to the Library of Congress (which also maintains a DPC digital collection, if you have yet more time, nowhere in particular to be, and become infatuated with these works the way I did this week). The Henry Ford retains tens of thousands of DPC prints and postcards. And the fabulously redesigned Buildings of Detroit has a nice gallery of vintage postcards, sent from Detroit, that includes some great Detroit Publishing Company pieces.

In fact, I thought to myself whilst compiling this post, what about that BoD.com postcard I just bought from City Bird?

Sure enough:

macomb postcard

That’s General Alexander Macomb on Washington Boulevard, by the way. I bought it to remember how much I love General Alexander Macomb, and this statue of General Alexander Macomb, but now, quite surprisingly, it’s a remembrance of another really stunning slice of city history that I didn’t even know about until this week.

So many lizards under so many unsuspecting stones. I tell you.

winter canfield avenue

Winter Morning – Corner of Canfield and Second, Detroit. Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1905

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Richard Barnes: Museums, mortality and eternal return

October 6, 2009 in Art, Culture | No comments

On Sunday we went to Richard Barnes’s lecture on Animal Logic, his installation at the Cranbrook Institute of Science (part of the Artology series, a collaboration presenting “visual and experiential examples of the ways in which art and science frequently parallel or complement each other,” which will hold over creative-types while the Cranbrook Art Museum is closed for renovations).

The photographer gave a comprehensive introduction to his life as a photographer — working on assignment, documenting archeological excavations for universities and museums — and as an installation artist. His work, at its most basic, is about objects in space: buildings (like the Unabomber’s cabin, a series that is not on display in this exhibition but which Barnes discussed extensively in his lecture), tools, fetishized objects of trades and professions, the body as object and objects on display. There’s a sculptural element to this work — something formal.

exhibit a

But there’s also something intensely interrogatory at the heart of his work; in the Unabomber series, Barnes explores the building on trial, the building as an object of interrogation. And in a series on the excavation of the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco — built over a Gold Rush-era cemetary — Barnes explores what goes inside of museums and what stays outside (or underneath) them and questions the authority of the museum in preserving, displaying and creating our past.

legion of honor

(I’m reminded of a recent conversation about the British Museum, which a friend described as hilarious, and how the artifacts, although they should probably be returned to the nations they were looted from, are in the British Musuem to stay, and unintentionally create a shadow museum — a permanent exhibition on the history of British colonialism. But that’s another blog.)

Animal Logic is about museums, too — specifically, natural history museums — and what goes on underneath them, in this case in a more figurative sense, as the artist explores museum objects (mostly taxidermy) in transition, or in storage. The museum is a theater, and Barnes allows us to go backstage with him to see the rigging.

animal logic

The exhibition is like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: disarticulated skulls, bird nests made out of trash, beheaded mallards, tiny stuffed parakeets so bright they look like they’ve been painted, installed on their backs with their skinny legs in the air. (Further reading on Animal Logic should include the New York Times’ piece on “New Antiquarians” and the Morbid Anatomy blog and the artwork of Cassie Smith.)

It’s a critical survey of the way we see nature from inside an institution, but with the incorporation of “Murmur,” a 2007 multimedia installation about starling migration in Rome, the exhibition takes on a layer of graveyard meditation, too: the defiance of death through the eternity of taxidermy (hints of humanity’s romance with ancient Egypt, and Barnes worked there on a dig with Yale); the creepy liveliness of a mounted stag’s head; the second death of a stuffed specimen taken off display; with the starlings, aspirations of eternal return.

New photographs and specimens for the exhibition were taken behind-the-scenes from Cranbrook’s extensive ornithology collection, and it’s amazing to go upstairs after spending some time with Animal Logic and see the Science Institute dazzlingly refreshed. Richard Barnes makes art from artifact; upstairs in the science museum, the artifacts on display— dinosaur bones, stuffed peacocks, pinned butterflies—look curiously like art.

bugs and butterflies

Barnes also has corresponding exhibitions at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (through December) and Uof M’s Institute of Humanities (through October 30). For another perspective on photography, the Detroit Institute of Arts hosts a comprehensive study of Richard Avedon’s fashion photography through January 17. If objects in space are more your style, Breeding Ground continues at the Museum of New Art through November 21.

Animal Logic runs through January 3. Next up in the Artology series, Cape Farewell (hint: it’s about climate change. Fun!) opens January 13.

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