Contemporary Photographer Series - Dave Jordano

 from the series Detroit - Unbroken Down © 2011 Dave Jordano

Dave Jordano earned his BFA from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among numerous other public, private and corporate collections. A solo exhibition of his ongoing series, Detroit - Unbroken Down, was held earlier this year at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn, NY. Jordano was recently interviewed by Matthew Brown for our Contemporary Photographer Series (CPS).

In 1977, you established your own commercial photography studio in Chicago. After more than thirty years of working in that field, what made you transition to fine art in 2001? Did you have to alter your way of thinking about photography?

Well, in many ways the idea of creating fine art has always been something that I've been looking forward to coming back to. As a student in Detroit at the College for Creative Studies in the early 1970's I was completely focused on making documentary/fine art work, and I produced a number of projects, but after graduation and having just gotten married, I needed to find a way to make an income so I moved to Chicago to start a career as a product/food photographer. I had no interest in photographing cars so I knew that if I wanted to be happy I had to leave Detroit and Chicago was a logical choice for the opportunities it offered. What I didn't expect was that it would take almost 25-30 years before I would return to making fine art photographs again.

My entire career as a commercial photographer involved working in a closed studio environment where every detail was controlled and mapped out to the nth degree. My creative process at that time was linear, predictable, calculated, and mistake free, which for advertising purposes made perfect sense because the medium required it. To take some same disciplines outside the studio and apply them to a new way of discovering photographs on the fly had no real value to me, so I had to re-evaluate my role as a photographer. I knew the work I was going to be making as a fine art photographer would have no relationship to anything I produced in the studio, and I wasn't sure at the time what the work would even look like. All I had to go on was the groundwork I laid out years earlier as a student, so in a way I felt like I was merely stepping outside the door and picking up where I left off. It sounds silly, but venturing outside really felt free and liberating and the process of "finding" a photograph was so much different than "creating" one. Photography became an act of constant discovering where every day opened up new opportunities and possibilities, a process of clearing out the cobwebs so to speak. It didn't matter if I was a success one day and a total failure the next. It was all about the experience of reconnecting and developing a new way of seeing.

© 1973 Dave Jordano

At the beginning of your career as a student, you first began photographing Detroit. After decades of storage, what compelled you to evaluate this early work? What effect, if any, did your rediscovery of these early negatives have on your current project, Detroit - Unbroken Down?

After graduating and starting a career in commercial photography I totally forgot about the work I made as a student. It just didn't seem relevant at the time. It wasn't until the late 1990's when scanners and inkjet printing technology became available that I began to look at my earlier 4x5 work, and only recently the 35mm work I made. Around 2000, I scanned and printed a series of early portraits and showed them to a gallery dealer. Although she liked the work, she encouraged me instead to make new photographs, where upon I shelved the early work for another 10 years. It was good advice at the time because it motivated me to produce several new bodies of work over the next decade, but the real kicker was when all of the books about Detroit's ruination were coming out and making all the media headlines. The historical shift between how I portrayed Detroit in the early 70's compared to where it is today in terms of its social, political and racial make-up, coupled with the way current photographers were visualizing the city, really accelerated the push for me to re-examine my early work. But because Detroit had suffered such a devastating loss over the years, I knew it would be difficult to bridge my early work in any logical way with the current dynamics that were gripping the city. I initially went back to Detroit in 2010 to work on a re-photography project by photographing the same locations I shot 37 years earlier. The comparative studies were shocking and revealing, showing a city that had transformed dramatically from only a few short decades earlier. I hadn't been back to Detroit in over three decades, so my first reaction was utter disbelief! I couldn't believe the level of destruction that had taken place. This certainly wasn't the Detroit I remembered as a young man going to college in the early 70's. It looked more like a city from a third world country. This constant obsession by other photographers and the media to focus only on Detroit's abandoned and ruined architecture affected me deeply. Not that their work didn't have validity, but it captured a very narrow, one-dimensional side of the city that was negative and damaging. It became imperative that I needed to figure out a way to alter the public perception so to speak, to try and right what I thought was a horrible misrepresentation of a city that still had 700,000 people living in it. That's when I started photographing the neighborhoods around the city and the people who lived there. When I look for a correlation between my early work and what I've done recently, the connection is through its people and not the crumbling brick and mortar. I'm happy to say that Detroit, although struggling, is still alive and coping, in spite of what has transpired during the declining post-industrial era.

from the series Prairieland © 2007 Dave Jordano

In Prairieland, you photographed small towns and rural communities throughout the state of Illinois. Did you have to change your approach when you began photographing urban areas in the heart of Detroit?

Yes, very much so. Throughout the work I made in Illinois I rarely, if ever, went back to the same place twice. I kept my distance and tried to observe as an outsider, as someone who was looking into a way of life that was unfamiliar but trying to make sense of it all. I found the experience somewhat surreal and often wound up looking for idiosyncratic qualities that related to the landscape and the marks that people left behind. The landscape is so flat and barren and stripped of natural vegetation that it's easy to feel a sense of emptiness and loneliness while traveling through it, and I think those feelings definitely seeped into the work I made there. Many of the people I photographed also gave me the sense that they wished they could be somewhere other than where they were. In the end, the Terra-Caelum series symbolized the stark beauty of the mid-western landscape and revealed what it really was, an economically-driven, farming behemoth.

In contrast, the Detroit work became the antithesis of what the Prairieland project was. Making connections and forging relationships has been the driving force behind the work and is what gives the Detroit project its weight. I certainly couldn't have made half the photographs from the series without returning over and over again to the same places. The more times I would visit someone, the more access I was allowed. The people of Detroit are proud of their history and where they're from and there is definitely something about living in Detroit that propels them to transcend all the hardship and negativity associated with it. In many ways, people there have been living with so little for so long with their backs against the wall that it has actually crafted many self-sufficient communities. Bartering is a common practice, community gardens are an essential part of the food chain, neighborhood watches are in effect and many residents pitch in to clean up the abandoned lots on their street. This collective effort is something you don't see in more affluent neighborhoods but is born out of a necessity in poorer areas of Detroit. When city services become so lean, residents will often take it upon themselves to improve their surroundings. There are two ways to look at your situation, you either accept it or you try to improve it. This to me is encouraging on a human, social, and personal level. This gist of it is that it's a project about survival, perseverance, and beating the odds.

from the series Detroit - Unbroken Down © 2012 Dave Jordano

Throughout your career, you have addressed a wide variety of social topics from community and faith, to resilience and neglect. What inspires you to photograph these subjects?

I think that being a tolerant and caring human being and having an interest in others is a quality that a lot of documentary photographers share. I see photography as a way to open a window to the world, even if it's in your own backyard. Myself personally, I find inspiration when I'm away from home, exploring other aspects of society and culture. If photography is a tool to enrich others' lives while also expanding one's knowledge of the world, how perfect a combination is that? I'm not as interested in photographing the middle or upper class of society as much as I am of those who have lived a life of hardship. People who live on the fringes of the economic ladder are far more inspirational to me than those who work on Wall Street. Be it small, inner-city African American storefront churches, quirky, slowly fading away rural communities, or small enclaves like Marktown in East Chicago, Indiana; these often small segments of culture and society are what drive my interests. The Detroit work has been my most challenging project because it involves such an exhaustive level of physical groundwork and human interaction, much of it involving total strangers who live in a 140 square mile area. Having said that, dozens of the people I've met have become good friends and I'm really grateful for that. I'm blown away by the inner strength that so many people I've photographed in Detroit possess and I hope that this quality is evident in the photographs I've made of them.

from the series Detroit - Unbroken Down © 2010 Dave Jordano

Since beginning Detroit - Unbroken Down in 2010, you have produced eleven portfolios of images. Where do you expect the work to go moving forward?

That's the $64,000 question (you millenniums probably won't get that reference). I've just finished having a solo show at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn which went very well. The work has been published in many magazines, most of them in Europe and Russian Esquire. The work has been part of several group shows too. Several webzines and blogs have featured the Detroit work and I appreciate that. German GEO is going to publish a major article in their magazine this year as well. A book would be the next logical step and I am looking into the possibilities of partnering with a publisher. But really the most dominant exposure has been on the Internet and viewers who have logged onto my website. I receive emails every week from people who comment on the work and say how much they admire it. That alone is rewarding enough.