Julia Margaret Cameron, Enid from Idylls of the King, 1874

On September 2 the DIA opens a new exhibition, Photography – The First 100 Years: A Survey from the DIA’s Collection. Taking a look at the early years of photography and its development as a new art form, the DIA presents a survey of 90 works from its collection. Included are a number of notable rare works from the 19th century as well as iconic imagery from the 1920s and 1930s. Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke White, Dorothea Lange in addition to 50 other pioneers and great innovators of the medium are on view in the exhibition which runs through January 3, 2010.

Unknown Photographer, Soldier and Companion, 1861-65, tintype.

One of the highlights from this exhibition is a tintype portrait of an African American couple from the 1860s. The process, a photographic image made on metal, appeared in the 1850s.  The DIA was fortunate enough to acquire it back in 2001, when it went on the auction block with other items from the collection of Jackie Napoleon Wilson, a Detroiter who developed an important and rare collection of 19th-century portraits of African Americans over the years. The exhibition moves onward from the 19th century with sections devoted to the pictorialist, modernist and social documentary eras. Photography – The First 100 Years kicks off a new and exciting season of photography exhibitions this fall 2009 and into spring 2010 at the DIA – here’s the round-up:

Avedon Fashion Photographs 1944-2000- opening October 18, 2009 through January 17, 2010. The DIA will host the first large-scale fashion retrospective since Richard Avedon’s death in 2004. Organized by the International Center for Photography, New York, the exhibition includes 181 images – many are well-known photographs – in addition to magazines and other interesting ephemera that illustrates the long and legendary career of one of America’s most successful and interesting photographers.

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs 1955 opening March 3 through July 4, 2010. This exhibition includes over 60 black-and white photographs taken by Robert Frank in Detroit. Made during his travels through the U.S. photographing for his book The Americans, Frank observed Detroiters as they lived and worked at mid century in the U.S. In this rare body of work, many of which will be on view for the first time at the DIA, Frank documented the day-to-day lives of Americans as he tried to mingle with assembly line workers at the Rouge Factory, took in a movie at the Gratiot Drive-In, and experienced public life on Belle Isle and in the streets of Detroit. All were part of the Detroit experience as Frank perceived it over fifty years ago.

Writer Jack Lessenberry recently referred to Tiger Stadium as a “cathedral of America’s national pastime” (see http://static.record-eagle.com/2007/aug/05lessen.htm – for more information on the preservation of the stadium). Many people may think of sacred sites as places with religious bearings, but in our short-lived American history, many of us are hard pressed not to feel a sense of desecration over places, albeit of a secular nature, that have influenced and shaped our collective identity, particularly as Detroiters.

Tiger Stadium has seen the better side of a wrecking ball over the last few weeks. This image attempts to preserve, in very simple terms, a last glimpse of that sacred ground. But when I look at this picture, I can’t help sensing that the stadium seems to know its fate while it sits there patiently and quietly awaiting the inevitable. -nb

Thank you for posting this image of The Heidelberg Project – it is a unique site to Detroit, and I hope to see more of this type of imagery in the competition. I once read a quote by THP’s creator Tyree Guyton that this project is not simply art but more “like medicine. You can’t heal the land until you heal the minds of the people.” Its tough to communicate the aesthetic, social, and cultural complexities/impact of this site in just one picture, and there are many interesting photographs of THP on flickr.com.

With available light as well as the glimpse of the house roofline at the lower right and the totem-like structure, actually a tree on the left, you have carefully composed visual information from this site in a unique way expressing its “essence”, as Kenro Izu would say. You give the viewer just enough information to discern the subject – at least if you know Detroit well, – and perhaps to viewers who are not familiar with the city, the photograph may provoke further investigation. So the picture stands out from some of the others in this respect.

For those individuals out there who may not know about it ,The Heidelberg Project is a Detroit treasure conceived by artist Tyree Guyton. It began a little over twenty years ago when Guyton turned an abandoned crack house in his neighborhood on Heidelberg Street (on Detroit’s east side) into a public art installation. Check out their website for maps and news about it at www.heidelberg.org. FYI – the latest news on The Heidelberg Project – it is one of 15 projects selected to represent the U.S. in the 2008 Biennale Architecture exhibition Sept. 14 through Nov. 23 in Venice, Italy.

When artist Charles Sheeler visited Detroit to photograph the Rouge factory (another Albert Kahn designed factory complex in the Detroit area) in 1927, he referred to the it as a “Cathedral of Industry.” It is always interesting to hear an artist from Detroit refer to our industrial complexes as churches and sacred places. I am not surprised at all at this impression as these old historic sites are representative of our local culture particularly in regard to the automobile – a venerated object and symbol that will always be connected to Detroit’s history. But unlike Sheeler’s photographs of gleaming smokestacks, conveyors and machinery throughout th Rouge, this photograph tells a ghostly story of the transience and impermanance of tangible sacred monuments which may begin crumble and return to the earth. It is very similar to the manner in which Kenro Izu views and interprets ancient temples and other spiritual sites all over the world.

On Sunday, July 20 from 5 to 6 p.m. Amelia Chau and I will talk with Edwin Hoffman, host of his program “Speaking of Art” (WAAM 1600 broadcasting from Ann Arbor) about the exhibition Kenro Izu Sacred Places and our flickr.com “Detroit’s Sacred Places” photo contest.

Sacred @ the Train Station, A V Z (From the Detroit’s Sacred Places Flickr Group)

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on Zen Photography and the picture from the now- defunct Michigan Central Station on Michigan Avenue.The train station is a ghostly place these days, but perhaps it seems sacred because of its cathedral-like architecture, scale and remarkable light. You seem to understand very well the methodology of the artist regarding the essence of a place and share his ability to capture this in a photograph.

Preparing and presenting an exhibition at the DIA involves months of planning with a team of museum professionals who strive to make the experience of viewing art pleasurable and informative for a wide range of museum visitors. When I sat down to discuss the exhibition Kenro Izu Sacred Places with co-curator Amelia Chau, interpretive educator Madeleine Winslow, and designer Everett Kaiser in January 2008, we saw the photographs as powerful representations of many ancient sacred sites – the great pyramids of Cairo, the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and the ruins of Petra, among other places. We developed a strategy to express the meaning of the work in very clear terms by installing the work by geographical regions, using wall texts to describe the importance and sacredness of each site, and also including maps for those of us who are geographically challenged so-to-speak.

We agreed that Kenro has a very successful method of evoking “the sacred” and expressing a particular sense of a place in his photographs through formal means, and the exhibition clearly demonstrates this. Kenro creates dramatic compositions, and waits for the right lighting conditions to express the “spirit” or essence of a place. He pays particular attention to texture of the materials  used to build the structures and monuments including stone, volcanic ash, and mud brick as well as qualities of the natural landscape. His choice of photograph printing, the platinum palladium process, accentuates these details as the process yields fine detail in a photographic print.

Interestingly, we also agreed how seamless the process could look to the to our visitors, in other words, they may be thinking that Kenro very easily snapped a beautiful picture without much effort, but in actuality, he often makes arduous journeys through remote parts of the world, climbing mountains, hiking through jungles, and camping outdoors in all types of weather conditions to create his photographs. His camera alone weighs nearly 300 pounds! And his large negatives measure 14 x 18 inches, so he is limited to the amount of film he can bring to a particular site. Exposure of each negative must be carefully calculated. The negatives are then brought back to his U.S. studio for processing and printing. All in all, a painstaking process, but not without its rewards.

Like Kenro Izu, this photographer attempts to capture the essence of a place through light and atmosphere – a thoughtful picture of a contemplative and solitary moment.

Sacred Places, an exhibition of 56 stunning black-and-white platinum prints by Kenro Izu, opened yesterday at the DIA in the newly refurbished Albert and Peggy de Salle Gallery of Photography. Visitors to the museum are falling under the spell of these beautiful photographs often from ancient and remote areas in Asia, the Middle East in addition to views of Stonehenge and Easter Island.

I was fortunate to spend a day at Kenro’s studio in upstate New York earlier this year with Amelia Chau, my DIA colleague and co-curator of Sacred Places. Kenro has been photographing sacred sites throughout the world for over 10 years and published a book this year with recent work he made while traveling through the country of Bhutan, where he photographed in monasteries and villages. To hear the artist speak of his work is always a pleasure and a privilege, and I would encourage readers to attend his lecture (free with museum admission) in the DIA’s Lecture Hall on Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 2PM.

Nancy Barr

Hello all! My name is Nancy Barr. I am a Detroit native and have been a specialist in modernist and contemporary photography at the Detroit Institute of Arts for fourteen years as well as a teacher at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, and the University of Michigan, Dearborn. I first became interested in photography as a teenager and was inspired by the experimental work of Man Ray, fashion work of Guy Bourdin as well as the portraiture of Diane Arbus. Currently, I am organizing several exhibitions for the DIA featuring the work Robert Frank, Ari Marcopoulos and Doug and Mike Starn. In my hours away from the museum, I enjoy spending time with my husband, the artist Glenn Barr and daughter Avalon.