Tag: Dave Jordano

The masterful Dave Jordano has a new book, A Detroit Nocturne, published by PowerHouse Books. This new monograph continues his documentation of Detroit and reflects a life of looking at people and places with sensitivity and depth. In 2015, he released Detroit: Unbroken Down (powerHouse Books, 2015) which documented the lives of struggling residents, but this new monograph allows us to examine the history and beauty of Detroit at night. Places that are unremarkable in the daylight, take on new incarnations, glowing and proud. The photographs are not nostalgic, instead they are a tribute to the past and present, to the tenacity of a people and a city. As Dave states, “Pieces of the past, present, and future are rendered here to carefully consider. They are after all the physical evidence of where we have carved out our collective ambitions and lived out our dreams.”

Dave Jordano grew up just north of Detroit. When he left, after graduating from the College for Creative Studies in 1974, the city was still vibrant; the downtown office buildings were full of employees, the streets were bustling, and shops were open. 

The wonderful Dave Jordano has been a long time observer of Detroit, the city where he was born and traversed with a 35mm as a student, onto a 4×5, and today uses digital capture to document the changing landscape of a city in flux

To illustrate this week’s cover story on the city of Detroit’s fight to survive, TIME turned to the work of photographer Dave Jordano. A second-generation Detroit native living in Chicago, Jordano returned to his home city three years ago with a mission: not to photograph what’s been destroyed, but to record what’s been left behind and the lives of those coping with it. The photographer spoke with LightBox producer Vaughn Wallace on Tuesday; their conversation has been condensed and edited below.