Category : Detroit, MI

Detroit gives a photographer one advantage that almost no other American city does, and it is worth planning around rather than noticing on the day: there is room to stand back. Substantial open ground and surface parking through the downtown mean a whole building can be photographed entire from across the street, in one frame, rather than in fragments. For a city with this much 1920s architecture — ornate theatre facades, monumental civic fronts, a tower with a marquee on it — that matters enormously, because those buildings were designed to be seen whole and in most cities they no longer can be.

It is the one circumstance where going wide is right: a couple small at the base of an entire elevation reads as a photograph about the building and the city. The same openness means low sun reaches street level across a wider area than in a canyon city, so the last ninety minutes deliver raking light on masonry from more positions than usual — and Detroit's radiating boulevards overlay the grid, so some streets take low sun at angles the grid streets never do, which is worth reading off a map before the day rather than discovering on foot.

The second thread through these guides is the theatre stock. Detroit was wealthy when its picture palaces and opera houses went up and it spent accordingly, which leaves an unusual concentration of dense, intact, three-dimensional ornament — and dense ornament has one rule that governs every frame near it. It reads as ornament only when light crosses it at an angle and casts a small shadow beside every element; under the flat, low, downward wash that house lighting provides, the most decorated ceiling in the state photographs as a dark field.

One source placed close to parallel with a surface brings all of it back, which makes it a one-light problem rather than an equipment problem. The corollary is the request worth making at every one of these venues and almost never made: whether the house lights can be brought up plain, white and undimmed, for a few minutes before guests arrive. That is the only chance to photograph a room as a room.

And Michigan's seasons are four real ones, with one winter fact that catches people out — snow turns a street into a very large reflector, so the tall windows at the base of a period building give softer, brighter and more even light in February than at any other time of year. Several of these venues are genuinely easier to photograph in winter than in summer, and the guides say so where that is true.