Tag: Detroit
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Another Year, Another City
2015 was another year of change. After splitting my time in Chicago and Cambridge over the last couple of years, it’s time to add another city into the mix. Since August, I have been hopping between Chicago and Minneapolis, where I am now an assistant professor of sociology at St. Olaf College. Even with the…
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Another Year of Projects and A Little Travel
Even more than 2013, I spent 2014 working on projects, including the films Almost There and The Area, and photography series about subsidized housing in New York City and Japan’s Tōhoku region. When not working on those projects, I continued to travel through the United States, often to work on my ongoing collaboration with Michael…
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A Year of Projects and More Travel
2013 was yet another year of big changes: I finished my fieldwork for my dissertation; I started regularly spending time in both Chicago and Cambridge, Massachusetts; and I started a major shift in the balance of my photographic and video work. In previous years, I pursued a relatively equal combination of project and non-project work.…
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Visiting Detroit the Day it Declared Bankruptcy
The news about Detroit’s bankruptcy broke as I finished packing the car for the four hour drive across Michigan. We weren’t visiting Detroit to cover its bankruptcy and didn’t seek out the choreographed events looping through the headlines. Other than bumping into a press conference complete with half a dozen news vans and plenty of…
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In Between Detroit’s Failing Streetlights
With Detroit’s pending emergency manager likely addressing the city’s failing streetlight system, and business groups funding streetlights on their own, I thought it was time to post an excerpt of a project on which I’ve been working since 2009. When I moved from Chicago to Southwest Detroit for the summer of 2009, I was determined…
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A Year of Demolition in Chicago (and Some Travel)
After filling 2010 and 2011 with travel, I changed gears in 2012 to spend most of the year in Chicago working on two local projects. The first was the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation supported To be Demolished series, in which I photographed 100 buildings threatened with demolition throughout the city. Among my goals for the…