"Algernon with His Pet Dog Babe," Moran Street, Eastside, Detroit, 2010

Dave Jordano, Algernon with His Pet Dog Babe, Moran Street, Eastside, Detroit, 2010.
Image: © and courtesy the artist.

This image is the first photograph I took in Detroit that changed my way of thinking about how to approach my now five-year project on documenting the city. So much had already been said and photographed about Detroit’s abandonment and the so-called images of “ruin porn” that fetishized the cities misfortune, that when I first went back to explore my hometown in 2010, I began to question the motives of those who had preceded me and their intentions. After all, there were still 700,00 people living there, but the only published photographs you could find depicted a city devoid of people, creating an empty, humanless, dystopian wasteland. Where were all the people and how were they coping with the spoils of living in a post-industrial city that had fallen on the hardest of times? Why were they not being represented?

Where were all the people and how were they coping with the spoils of living in a post-industrial city that had fallen on the hardest of times? Why were they not being represented?

This picture of Algernon standing on the front porch of his house holding his pet dog Babe crystallized my purpose for making over 30 more trips to Detroit to document the city. Having owned his house for 45 years and raised a family, he now lived alone in a house that the movement of time had finally begun to tear apart. We talked a long while before I photographed him and although I didn’t dwell on the reasons why he let his house fall so far into disrepair, the answers were all around us. You could see it in the landscape and the vast stretches of poverty that spread out for miles in all directions. His house was scarred with years of disinvestment, unemployment, white flight, racism, civic corruption, and corporations that closed factories in the name of higher profits. Here before me was a physical metaphor for all of the problems that Detroit has endured. The fact that Algernon still affectionately thought of this run down, sorely neglected structure as his home was a testament to his pride of ownership in spite of his inability to maintain it and the inevitable forces that brought their havoc on him. With no money in hand, the house looms over him like so much over-bearing weight as he surrenders to the enormity of the task of fixing it up. So much of Detroit is represented by people like Algernon whose lives are hanging on by a shoestring, living day to day with nothing more than a few dollars. I do appreciate the fact that Detroit is on the rebound, but the reality is that there are only roughly seven square miles of the city that are receiving the majority of the redevelopment money. It’s the other 132 square miles that I don’t want people to forget about.

Dave Jordano was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1948. He received a BFA in photography from the College for Creative Studies in 1974. A major exhibition of his work from his Articles of Faith project was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois in 2009. In 2015, Jordano has been nominated for the Canadian AIMIA AGO Photography Prize and is a semi-finalist for the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Jordano has exhibited internationally and his work is included in the permanent collection of private, corporate, and museum institutions, most notably the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Detroit Historical Museum. His first critical book, published by the Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago titled, Articles of Faith, Small African American Storefront Churches of Chicago, was released in April 2009. His current project titled, Detroit: Unbroken Down documents the cultural and societal changes of his hometown of Detroit and will be published by PowerHouse Books in the fall of 2015. Dave Jordano currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.




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