So my favourite piece from the estate sale picking this weekend was one gallery expo catalog still sitting a shelf 30 minutes before the end of a sale. Yeah, it was coming home with me. Moving to metro Detroit I love learning the history of what is around me especially history captured through a camera. The Detroit captured through the lens of the city born photojournalist J. Edward Bailey III was one still coming to terms with the race riots of 1967, poverty and disorder. The City Within was published in 1969 to accompany a Detroit Institute of the Arts exhibition, while parts of this exhibition were of it's time, many issues are still resonate today. Particularly the human condition.
Children still play, houses lay empty but there is a new sense of hope within the city. Yet things have changed since 1969 whichever way you look at it. There is no need to mention so forwardly that Bailey himself was black - [although that is not to say that race isn't important] and the forwarding note corresponds with the racial equality movement of that time, that Bailey was just "a man with a camera". The images provided with the catalog documents the sense of hope and change, but also the changing 1960s world of the old and new colliding. Of the looks and stares by the elderly upon an interracial couple, ongoing racial tensions and protests but hope and change through official lines of city leaders but more so through love and the young.
Looks very interesting - some fantastic photographs!
ReplyDeleteLiz @ Shortbread & Ginger
I'm certainly glad I re-homed it, the photographs are great to just look at over and over.
DeleteOooh that's fun!
ReplyDeleteWas a cool find.
DeleteWow. The book looks and sounds wonderful. I love looking through old photographs and getting a glimpse at history. It is one thing to hear about it, but another to see it. What a great find!
ReplyDeleteExactly - I think photographs can tell you more then the words can too and can take you right there. Say for example the photographs of the looks by the elderly upon the interracial couple, its one thing reading about it, but by seeing the photographs you get to see the context more and see exactly how it was.
DeleteWhat a wonderful piece of social history, I'd have bought that, too! x
ReplyDeleteI love social history and seeing and learning about the "real" everyday people.
Delete