Over the past few weeks I have been undertaking a new personal project, creating a dark room. Aside from the fact that it will be cool to develop my own photos, I decided to make a dark room because of the self discipline in shooting film. When I take my dslr out, I turn into a trigger happy zombie, taking pictures of anything and everything only to never look at them again. One roll of film has 36 exposures, and developing a single photograph takes time and money, this requires a certain amount of forethought as to where to put your energy – and cash.<\/p>\n
This change in mentality has got me thinking about the content of my photographs. Detroit, for some, is a photography mecca due to its unique history, architecture, and blight. But what is the effect of outsiders using abandoned buildings and urban decay as a backdrop for their brand, or as a prop in their high fashion shoots? It ignores Detroit’s history, and silences the community of hundreds of thousands of people who call this place home.<\/p>\n
I myself am new here, and am still trying to figure out how best to represent the city in my photography. I don’t know how to photograph abandoned buildings without glorifying or romanticizing them. But I feel good that I am conscious of this friction, and will be making an active effort to learn about representation with my new project.<\/p>\n
As an addendum: This idea of silencing existing populations, and representation of Detroit extends beyond photography and visual representations. Big companies moving downtown come to mind for me. I am struggling with the question of how companies should grapple with their place in the city. Their brands profit off the Detroit “brand” and “story,” in what ways can they responsibly reciprocate that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the past few weeks I have been undertaking a new personal project, creating a dark room. Aside from the fact that it will be cool to develop my own photos, I decided to make a dark room because of the self discipline in shooting film. When I take my dslr out, I turn into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14920\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.challengedetroit.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}