Detroit:Definition

My father died when I was too young to ask. My mother spent so little time there it never featured in her stories. I have lived my life by the California beach. But I was born in Detroit. My photographic career often focuses on the American Story. There was a gap in mine. In January 2011 on my 65th birthday, I started my long-term exploration of Detroit, the city of my birth, from which I left at age one. I was armed only with a sketchy map of my father’s “footprints”: the 5 years he lived, worked, and played in Detroit as an advertising “madman” and then, where he brought my NYC mom to marry and have 2 children before moving us soon after to LA. The map sent me to what I love best: presence in place, still images evoking histories. Place is what Detroit is about, this originally French city defined by its strategic strait between several Great Lakes, raised up by its early 20th Century industrial prominence – steel and cars – and pummeled down by economic shift and racial inequality while fighting back. The decade-long photo/book project was a challenge to me, a photographer of place but rarely people. Yet it is those I met who helped me discover their – and my – city and while their faces may be absent from this small portfolio, my work is imbued with their history, their resilience, their innovation and always, their generous spirit. DETROIT:DEFINITION, the photo/book project, was to end on my 75th birthday, this past Inauguration Day 2021, at my Detroit “home” that I have photographed on each of my 17 Detroit visits. The final story: that Detroit remains significant for the American story; its strongest asset: its people. It is they who truly speak to the city.