Julia Reyes Taubman worked in semi-seclusion on her Detroit photography project for nearly seven years and after almost 40,000 photographs she’s assembled her first book with the help of former Detroit Free Press art critic Marsha Miro and book designer Lorraine Wild, a former Detroiter who endowed the book with its visual rhythms and understated focus.

Wild builds up a subtle narrative and pacing structure for the mammoth 488 page book, framing the images into an almost cinematic jigsaw puzzle, from its 1970s’ conceptual-art tone cover with it’s dark burnished industrial-edged spine to its chapter divisions cataloged into East, Central and Western regions. Photographs are often strung together into clusters like a small Greek chorus gathered together by type, size or setting. Page layouts bounce off each other, overlapping and mirroring forms. Some pages extend into one another with their borders continuing the skylines and horizons, areas of pure white acting like rest stops along the way. There is visual music and poetry in large evidence, the brilliance of the design sculpting the project into the category of “book as art object.”

Beginning with the East is a shot of the Detroit river, the true star, life-blood and namesake of the city. It’s a mysterious washed-out photograph, shrouded in fog and drifting off the page like the numinous seascapes of Hiroshi Sugimoto, balanced on the edge of life or death. The book moves forward and westward like a child taking its first steps, slowly, carefully, opening its eyes.

Punctuated by visual mysteries and alien landscapes, (a chair perched in a tree, an odd telephone glued to a tall pole, blue snaky hoses in a forest swamp, dark windowless biker bars, stained crack-house mattresses, gang graffiti and bizarre rubbish piles, homes turned inside-out) the book casts a mythic labyrinthian quality as it passes through gray overcast winter skies, skeleton tree branches and snow covered grass. The quietly surreal, bluesy and lonely nature of Detroit  creates the perfect backdrop and  subject matter for photographic inquiry.

Detroit: 138 Square Miles reads like a visual journey through the scarred backsides and forgotten wastelands of humanity, a spiritual quest through small neighborhoods, infernos, architectural gems, seedy bars and secret locations. Photos from a low-flying airplane splash across the page like exclamation points, revealing powerful rarely seen views of the city, showing in detail the vastness of its rusted arterial and organic nervous system.

In her 1953 non-fiction masterpiece, The Pleasure of Ruins, the late novelist Rose McCauley wrote, “Ruin is always over-stated; it is part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination, half of whose desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth.” This volatile mixture of the sublime and ordinary, the historic and powerless, the built up and smashed, ignites an arresting condition for the photographer and viewer. The imagination is stirred by the contemplation of ruins as we cast ourselves inside the post-apocalyptic future of the present. History is never completely preserved or frozen by photographs. We are left with tracings from the past, fragments that form an ephemeral reality beyond our reach. As observers we are caught inside the poetic conundrum of the ruin and the photograph, a state in constant change, dissolution, romanticism and recovery.

Detroit: 138 Square Miles is equally an autobiography and diary about its maker as it is a love letter to the city. Taubman’s appreciation of modernist buildings and formalism are noted in abundance and are set off alongside her rock ‘n roller aesthetic. The photographer’s fascination with outsiders, criminals and loners connect and syncopate with the outgrown wilderness of the city. The story also unfolds how an artist crafts an identity from their surroundings. The city’s isolation and despair is gently opened up and contrasted by public parks, museums, rock concerts, sports arenas, architectural details and little known neighborhood folk-art curiosities. Taubman’s shared journey is not unlike Baudelaire’s conception of the flânuer: “To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world…”  -not just a crash course on Detroit but also a compendium of a magical kind, a private index with its own unique codes, style and purpose.

Detroit: 138 Square Miles includes a warm reflective introduction by local legend Elmore “Dutch” Leonard. He states, “The reason I’m still here must lie in Julia’s pictures… there is beauty in despair and sometimes a glimmer of hope. ” – and in Jerry Herron’s introductory essay “Living With Detroit”,  he states, “.. the truth of this place is not something you say or take home in an image, but something you do and keep on doing until you become part of the design.” Detroit citizens have an undying passion for their city and its history, reflected in a flood of Detroit-centered books recently published. Generous footnotes next to thumbnail prints in the back of the book fill in details and background history forming a well captioned book-inside-a-book. The printing quality compares with the best of any fine-art photography book published today and is destined to add significantly to the discussion on ruins and the post-apocalyptic cities we inhabit. This latest addition makes a handsome cornerstone to any collection on or about Detroit.

The last photograph in the book is the gravestone of the great bluseman Son House who spent his final years in semi-obscurity working as a janitor in the Old Main building at Wayne State University, his Dry Spell Blues could be a fitting epitaph and accompaniment to the photographs:

“It has been so dry, you can make a powder house out of the world

Well, it has been so dry, you can make a powder house out of the world

And holler money mens, like a rattlesnake in his coil

I throwed up my hands, Lord, and solemnly swore

I have throwed up my hands, Lord, and solemnly swore

Well, ain’t no need of me changing towns, it’s the drought everywhere I go

It’s a dry old spell everywhere I been

Oh, it’s a dry old spell everywhere I been

I believe to my soul this old world is bound to end..” –Dry Spell Blues, Son House

Local Detroit area photographer Lazlo Regos has recently put together a beautiful calendar of  American Synagogues featuring many outstanding architectural treasures throughout the country. The 2010-2011 American Synagogue Calendar is available now from the Book Beat. Enjoy a peak at these amazing jewels in the video Lazlo put together from his photographs below.  L’Shana Tova – Happy New Year!

“The forthcoming “ABC3D,” by Marion Bataille, a French book designer, does for paper what Claymation did for mud. It’s a three-dimensional, interactive, cinematic treat for the littlest fingers right on up to the oldest eyes, easily the most innovative alphabet book of the year, if not the decade. It’s virtually impossible not to find something to manipulate, admire, chuckle over or just plain play… Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) with between the holographic covers of this visual feast. Watch O and P transform themselves into Q and R with the flick of a translucent overlay; see C flip over to become D and back again merely by moving the page; marvel as V becomes W through the magic of reflections; smile as the two round centers of S spin like barber poles; play U like a many-stringed instrument and imagine the music. Beyond clever, it’s a whole new way for young learners to see both connections and differences as well as for adults to rediscover the magic that lurks below the everyday. A short video of two disembodied hands flipping through the pages has garnered more than half a million views on YouTube. Wonderful fun for one and all.” — Kristi Jemtegaard, Washington Post Book World 

Prepare to be amazed. From the lenticular cover that changes with the angle of your hands all the way to the Z, ABC3D is as much a work of art as it is a pop-up book.

From Raw Vision #42, an article about Franz Gsellmann’s wonderfully eccentric kinetic sculpture, the World Machine:

Tucked behind the southern Austrian hills in a farmhouse outbuilding sits the Weltmaschine (the World Machine). Created over 23 years by Franz Gsellmann, the machine is made up of hundreds of separate parts, including a ship’s propeller, two gondolas, a Dutch windmill, a Persian goblet, a salt and pepper set, five crucifixes, 560 wooden beads, a glass Jesus and a glass Mary, eight lampshades and a barometer, held together with a brightly coloured lattice of wire, pipes and gear wheels. Once powered into action the 25 motors, one-armed bandit, 64 bird whistles, 20 fan belts and 14 bells, whistle, clang and whirr. The 200 coloured lights flash. The poky Austrian farm building is filled with a blaze of noise, colour and light.

The creator of the machine, Franz Gsellmann, grew up dreaming of becoming an engineer, but with just four years of schooling, he seemed destined to spend his life on the family smallholding. His life changed in 1958: seeing an article in the local newspaper about the Brussels Atomium, a huge structure symbolising a crystallised molecule of iron, created by the engineer André Waterkeyn for the International Exhibition, Gsellmann travelled out of Austria for the first time, visited Belgium, and studied the architectural structure for himself.

Back home in Kaag, Gsellmann abandoned working on his family’s smallholding and began to construct his own machine, his own unique engineering project. Starting with a model Atomium, constructed from 25 hula-hoops, he began to build in secret. For the first eight years he offered his family no explanations, locking himself away each morning and resurfacing exhausted at night, occasionally leaving the house on trips to search out new components.

It took some time for other people to appreciate his work: neighbours would often laugh at the tiny 90-pound man wheeling his barrow of selected oddities, and his family would react with rage and shame. A silent man, frequently reduced to tears, Gsellmann insisted that ‘one day it will be good for something’, drawing courage from his faith that ‘God gave me this gift’.

He believed the machine had its own life. He cleaned his creation every morning, breathing onto and polishing each tiny part. He obsessed about its health, incorporating a ‘computer’, a counting machine which was supposed to indicate malfunctions.

* The World Machine’s official home page.

The R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford contains approximately 1,700 hours of audio and video recordings, originally recorded in formats ranging from wire recordings to reel to reel tapes, U-Matic video tapes, and 16mm film. The obsolete recording formats and fragility of the materials have made the media collection inaccessible, and many of the recordings have been untouched for decades. This digitization project, funded in part by a grant from the federal Save America’s Treasures program, preserves the fragile originals by migrating them to more robust digital formats, and significantly increases scholarly access to this important historical content. “Thanks to digitization, today these recordings can be accessed by anybody with an Internet connection,” says Hsiao-Yun Chu, Assistant Curator for the Fuller Archive.

See yourself on the planet: You will need to register first, a simple process and then you can dive freely into this oceanic collection of Bucky consiousness. Find a quiet place, put on the headphones and dive in. The effect is like being in a classroom with one of the great visionary minds and teachers of the 20th century.

Take the Journey on Space-ship Earth at: R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER DIGITAL COLLECTION

Southern Exposures: Past and Present Through the Lens of William Christenberry
By PHILIP GEFTER Source: New York Times, Published: July 2, 2006

THEY were like perfect little poems,” Walker Evans said about the three-inch-square pictures of the American South that William Christenberry took with his amateur Brownie camera.

The Brownie was never intended for exacting documentation or creative expression; it was the camera used for snapshots of family gatherings and vacations in the 1940’s and 50’s. What a crafty little camera, then, for Mr. Christenberry’s persistent chronicle of the regional architecture and artifacts in his native Hale County, Ala. His little snapshots managed to capture the local dialect of his hometown in visual terms.

Mr. Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., not 20 miles away from the migrant farmers Evans photographed that same year and later published in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with text by James Agee.

The sharecroppers in Evans’s photographs lived in a house across the cotton fields from the farm owned by Mr. Christenberry’s grandparents. By the time Mr. Christenberry discovered the book, in 1960, he was a young artist. When he moved to New York the next year, it took him months to work up the courage to call Evans, then the picture editor at Fortune.

“Young man, there is something about the way you use this little camera that makes it a perfect extension of your eye,” is how Mr. Christenberry recalls Evans’s reaction to the Brownie prints. Speaking in a courtly Southern drawl in a phone interview from his studio in Washington, he said that Evans encouraged him to return to the South to continue his work.

The South became Mr. Christenberry’s subject, not only in the photographs for which he is now best known, but also in sculpture, painting and assemblages exploring his relationship to his Southern past. A major yearlong exhibition of Mr. Christenberry’s work in these mediums has just opened at the newly refurbished Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, and a comprehensive catalog, “William Christenberry,” has been published with Aperture. Simultaneously an exhibition of Mr. Christenberry’s photographs is opening on Friday at the Aperture Gallery in Chelsea.

By 1962 Mr. Christenberry had moved to Memphis. He met a young local photographer named William Eggleston and invited him to his studio, where a series of his color Brownie snapshots had been tacked to the wall. In the early 1960’s color film was considered too commercial and artificial to be used for art photography. Still, Mr. Eggleston’s one-man exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 was a milestone — despite its disapproving critics — and he became known as a pioneer among the first generation of color photographers. “It’s interesting to think that if Evans hadn’t encouraged Christenberry to go back to the South, Eggleston might still be a black-and-white photographer,” writes Walter Hopps, the founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston, in a posthumous essay in the catalog to the Smithsonian show.

Initially Mr. Christenberry picked up the Brownie camera to make color prints as references for his paintings. “I was about as interested in photography as I was in physics,” he said. “If you thought of the Brownie picture as a dream or an apparition, the prints were nothing more than a distant feeling of what the color made them seem.”

Mr. Christenberry, who has lived in Washington since 1968, makes annual pilgrimages to Hale County to document the personal landmarks of his youth. After the first big exhibition of his Brownie pictures, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1973, he became acquainted with other photographers of his generation. Encouraged by Lee Friedlander to experiment with a large-format view camera he took 30 sheets of 8-by-10-inch negative film down to Hale County in 1977.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. “I had to get a commercial photographer from Tuscaloosa to load the camera for me. I double-exposed the first sheet.”

Since then he has been working not only with the Brownie camera but also with 35-millimeter and 8-by-10 cameras. The different types of equipment, formats and films affect the look of a picture as much as the position of the photographer and the lighting conditions.
Compare “Church, Sprott, Ala., 1971,” taken with a Brownie camera, and “Church, Sprott, Ala., 1981,” taken with an 8-by-10 view camera. The Brownie image looks like a plastic toy model of a church. The exaggerated color gives the structure an unreal patina, and the lack of fine detail flattens the surfaces. By contrast, the level of fine detail in the 8-by-10 contact print, as well as the lens clarity, present a more recognizable record of the church as it really looked when Mr. Christenberry took the picture.
Enlarge this Image

“The church just pulls me in,” said Mr. Christenberry, who had been photographing Sprott Church every year. “It’s truly, as the hymn says, the church in the wildwood.”

Yet his photographs are only one component. In 1991 he returned to Sprott Church, disturbed to see that its spires were gone. Mr. Christenberry relied on his decades of pictures to make several sculptural pieces. “Sprott Church (Memory), 2005,” made of illustration board, encaustic and soil, is not only a homage to the church but also a souvenir from the region where he spent his youth.

“As I get older,” he said, “memory becomes a major part of my being.”

There are other sites he has chronicled from the same spot over many years, using different cameras, like the country store in Hale County that eventually became a social club. The photographic grids of these prints show the deterioration, transformation or even demise of individual structures over the course of time. The effect of the grid format is cinematic, like a long time-lapse movie slowed to individual frames at particular years.

Mr. Christenberry’s grids present the relics of a time and a place in a format similar to the work of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose photographic grids catalog the vestiges of a disappearing industrial landscape with a clinical eye. But Mr. Christenberry’s documentation is more personal, interpretive even. “The vast majority of what I do is a celebration of where I came from,” he explained.

Nicholas Nixon, another photographer Mr. Christenberry came to know in the 1970’s, has been making annual portraits of his wife with her sisters since 1975. Collectively Mr. Nixon’s photographs chronicle the passage of time and its effect on his family, just as Mr. Christenberry’s grids record how the passage of time changes vernacular architecture. They both return to the same subject, although with different intentions.

Despite Mr. Christenberry’s affection for Hale County, which to some extent drives his own expressive chronicle, not all aspects of the bygone South were halcyon. “How can I, as a Southerner, have turned a blind eye on racism?” Mr. Christenberry asked.

In the mid-1960’s he was able to take pictures of Ku Klux Klan events with a hidden camera. These images are part of an installation piece he has added to over the years, called “The Klan Room.” It’s a Pandora’s box of a room, filled with his paintings of Klansmen, photographs, sculptural objects and relics: a stark acknowledgment of the dark side of the South’s cultural history.

Mr. Christenberry didn’t grow up around the graceful antebellum mansions and elegant public buildings that reflect the gentility of the South, and they are not represented in his work. He chooses buildings, signs and relics based on their relationship to his own experiences.

“Son,” he recalls his mother once saying to him, “everybody in Washington, D.C., is going to think Alabama is one rusted-out, worn-down, bullet-riddled place based on your work.”

“TB Hicks Store, Newbern, Ala., 1976″ depicts a place that triggers memories. A vestigial structure that sagged to the left and the right when Mr. Christenberry shot it, the photograph provides an example of the vernacular architecture of his youth and a record of a building that no longer exists.

“It was a one-chair barbershop,” he said, with fondness, recalling that its chrome-trimmed, leather swivel chair reminded him of barber chairs he sat in as a child. “It was a great building as it began to shift, and, later, until it collapsed.”

Evans’s influence on Mr. Christenberry is evident in this picture. The straightforward approach, the simple composition, the ordinary roadside subject matter — all seem to quote directly from the style and the theme of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

“Walker was a very meaningful person in my life, but don’t forget Agee,” Mr. Christenberry said. “What Agee was doing in the written word was what I wanted to do visually.”

“The notion of a concert hall as the social center of a youth community was deeply impressed into the mind of Dearborn high-school teacher and WKNR-FM radio DJ “Uncle” Russ Gibb, who saw the possibilities after visiting the Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore in early 1966. San Francisco had already lured a number of Detroit artists, musicians and free-thinkers away from home with its counter-culture acceptance but Gibb knew a much larger contingent was still roaming Southeast Michigan in search of their own tribal gathering spot.” 

The Charles Agree designed Grande Ballroom has reserved for Detroit a place in international music history. An innovative venue for genre-establishing Michigan rock acts such as the MC5, the Stooges and the Rationals, the Grande also was the first venue to properly feature international acts of significant importance. The Who first presented the rock opera “Tommy” at the ballroom and legends such as Janis Joplin, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Jeff Beck, Jefferson Airplane, and the Yardbirds were regularly showcased. The Grande Ballroom was the legendary midwest equivalent of the Avalon and Fillmore West rock ballrooms in California.

Visit the Grande online at The Grande Ballroom. You’ll find photos, art, weblogs, gigology, interviews and history of the building and performance. Our mission is to create an archive of information including images, sound clips, stories, interviews, and biographical information related to the Ballroom from its opening in 1928 through its heyday in the 60’s and 70’s. A virtual ballroom.  

Sign an online petition to help preserve the Grande Ballroom and place it on the National Registry of Historical Buildings. Sign form at: Grande Ballroom Petition Online Source: thegrandeballroom.com

The Grande Ballroom as it looks today.