Project Description

The focus of The Changing Visual Typography of Detroit is documenting the changing built landscape of Detroit, Michigan by showing materials that depict words and messages in the urban environment. These items reflect the unique visual landscape of the city over the 20^th- and early 21^st-centuries.

This collection focuses on photographs that show the soul and personality of the city and its residents. The emphasis is not on fine art photographs and artworks, but on vernacular images that show everyday life and its surroundings, in an attempt to affect a lingering look on these commonplace things. The materials focus on the interplay between words, images, and the built environment that people interact with daily. What does that look like over time? What does it look like in a specific city with a unique visual style? How do the places we inhabit shape our collective memory?

Here are a few definitions to guide the perusal of the archive:

The term built environment refers to buildings and other elements created for human use. A vernacular landscape is a shared environment shaped by the people who inhabit it; vernacular architecture is the buildings inhabited by everyday people.

This archive follows in the documentary tradition of photographic projects such as the Farm Security Administration and the New Topographics movement.

Historical Background

“The primary goal of the Farm Security Administration was to combat the social and economic dislocations caused by the distressing agricultural climate” (Gorman, 2001) of the 1930s, caused by the Great Depression. It was part of the New Deal program spearheaded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The photographic agency of the FSA was not the initial focus of the program, but it ended up becoming what the program is most known for today. One of the ideals of the agency was to introduce “America to Americans” in a time when information creation and consumption was much slower than it is today.

New Topographics: This movement started in 1975 with the debut of an exhibition of the same name, featuring 168 black-and-white photographs of “rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centers, industrial sites and suburban houses” (O’Hagan, 2010). The idea was to show that seemingly trivial, commonplace, everyday landscapes were worthy of being made into art through photography, and worthy of being looked at.

This archive is an attempt to carry on the tradition of these two influential American photography movements by combining aesthetics from both to examine the city of Detroit.

Archival Concepts

Arrangement and description: The Changing Visual Typography of Detroit does not follow the principle of provenance or respect des fonds. The archive challenges those two core archival principles to create a documentary archive that is arranged by topical series and inside those series, chronological items. I chose to arrange the materials topically to emphasize the different cross section of materials, as well as to emphasize the content of the images rather than the creators. The items are arranged chronologically within their series, to reflect the “changing” part of the archive’s title.

“The archivist's role in relation to records is to reveal their meaning and significance - not to participate in the construction of meanings - through the exercise of intellectual control” (Duff and Harris, 2002, p. 264). As for description, I have tried to remain neutral in my captions and metadata descriptions of the items so as to avoid constructing meaning for the viewer. I’ve provided meaningful historical context where I was able to do so. My goal was to create an “architecture for [a] representational system” of these items (Yakel, 2003, p. 2).

Appraisal: The creation of this archive required careful appraisal of each item to determine if they accurately fit the scope of the project and if the items complemented or challenged each other. It took many iterations over the items to create the final set.

Record Selection

I located my archival material online through a few different archival collection databases. The top three archives that I found my materials in were the Detroit Historical Society, the Bentley Historical Library, and the Library of Congress. I drew extensively from the Vergara Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress.

Criteria: the majority of my materials are images that show a typographical message interacting with something else in the built landscape of the city. This “something else” includes buildings, passersby, or an entire street scene. I chose to include a couple of static posters, meaning digital scans of the art object itself, to further represent changing design styles. The archive is certainly subjective, in the respect that my goal was to choose materials that were visually interesting and would cause a viewer to linger. Another criterion was to select materials that fell into the vicinity of metropolitan Detroit.

User Groups

The primary users of my archive include artists, historians, and researchers. Their specific user needs require accessing more detailed metadata about the items than a general interest user would need. This includes medium, specific geographic location, creator, and historical context, on top of more basic fields such as date and general location. My secondary user group is general interest users and community members. The needs of the secondary user group are less detailed, due to the browsing, and potentially fleeting, nature of their interest. Community members would likely be interested in specific geographic location as well, so I’ve included street addresses in the metadata for items where applicable.

Perspectives

“Representation is an intentional relationship between the maker and the viewer” (Conway, 2015, p. 53).

The photographic images included in the archive were created mostly by non-residents. Two of the images were made by Arthur S. Siegel, an FSA photographer, and others were made by Camilo J. Vergara, a photographer who documents post-industrial American cities. This creates a disconnect between the person documenting and the community they are documenting. It enables “the potential for communication problems ranging from misinterpretation and error to falsehood and forgery” (Conway, 2015, p. 53). None of the images are inherently politically overt, although when you add a third party to the equation, the viewer, the possibility for misinterpretation multiplies.

This collection of images presents an interesting dichotomy of present and absent voices. Since this collection is a portrait of a city, one would think that the collective voice of its residents would be present. However, that’s not always the case. The voices of those who wrote graffiti on walls and fences, built and maintained businesses, participated in the 1967 riots, or painted murals are visible. But there are so many voices that are simultaneously absent. The voices of those who used to live in or operate abandoned homes and businesses; the stark emptiness of the street in some of the photographs; the advertisements or public safety notices created by those outside of the community or in positions of power, to potentially entice residents to do something or ostensibly make their lives better in some way; these are all ways in which the voices of the residents themselves are absent. As you view the archive, keep in mind the different ways that the scenes in the images can be read.

Author

This archive was created in Fall 2020 by Lauren Paljusaj, a first-year master’s student at the University of Michigan School of Information.