On the Road Again

It has been a long time since I probed the deep inner bowels of the city of Detroit, butt yesterday I put on my boots and headed in. Actually, I had a shooting project, a visit to a closed cemetery that is open for just a few hours twice a year. That was a bust because it was so damn cold, windy and wet that I didn't rediscover my fingers for a while after leaving. The mucho rains flooded quite a bit of the cemetery, turning it swampy.

But I did get a chance to revisit Detroit.

It's better in some ways. Many of the damaged properties have been removed, plowed over. Stores, too.

I had mixed feelings about revisiting my old haunts. It was nice to again get some urban images, toilets under freeway overpasses, shoes tossed over power lines feeding into traffic signals, that sort of thing. I don't find that in the burbs where I live. I find the inner city folk far more resourceful, too, finding creative ways to solve urban problems, like using truck van seats for porch perching, that sort of thing. After trolling for a few hours, though, I definitely got that "been there, done that" feeling. I used to hit the streets three times a week for roughly 3-4 hours a shot, religiously. That's a butt-numbing situation.

In my spare time (what little I have), I have been doing my photography thing, reading, looking, just spending huge amounts of time soaking it in. My latest projects have been recent color photography, a study of street photographers 1940 - 1959 (focusing on six pioneer photographers), and most recently, studying the works of a Czech photographer named Miroslav Tichy. During the period of Communist rule in his country, he lost himself in capturing the essence of women with homemade cameras, made from wood, rubber bands, duct tape, and hand polished plastic lenses. He captured images of anything female, and was quite the voyeur with his amateurish looking cameras. Quite eccentric, too. What a pervert! The photos are fascinating, mostly of very low quality and many stained (I'm not sure I want to know what substance stained them.)

Very unique.

Next on the agenda will be studying the photos of voyeurism and surveillance. I'm getting access to a book on the topic later today.

There's nothing wrong with being a voyeur, unless you get caught. I think Susan Sontag in her On Photography noted that all photographers are really voyeurs at heart.

Think about it.