“The struggles of the 1960s can be glimpsed, dramatically, in Leni Sinclair\u2019s MOTOR CITY UNDERGROUND: Photographs 1963-1978 (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit\/Foggy Notion Books, 407 pp.,), edited by Cary Loren and Lorraine Wild and with a contribution by Kristine McKenna. For many years Leni Sinclair was married to John Sinclair, a poet and jazz critic who by the end of the decade had become head of the White Panther Party, a Detroit-based attempt to forge a white working-class analogue to the Black Panthers. In the earlier \u201960s, Sinclair and his friends wear suits, organize jazz events featuring various immortals \u2014 John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler \u2014 and march for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam. By 1967, Sinclair looks like the prophet of the swamps, oversees a raucous scene featuring the MC5 and the Stooges, who are attempting to channel the energies of free jazz into populist rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, and promotes a platform calling for music, drugs and rutting in the streets (actual wording slightly different).<\/p>\n
Leni Sinclair\u2019s photos capture the carnivalesque excitement, disquiet and jejune playacting of this scene \u2014 asked later about the guns being waved around in various photos, she said: \u201cWe were hippies! \u2026 We were just showing off.\u201d She is a sensitive and versatile photographer, equally at ease depicting riots, communal decision-making, urban decay, cultural shifts and the vivid faces of the elders of Black music.” –Lucy Sante, “Immersive and Dramatic New Photography Books,” New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n