There You Are

This is my beloved neighbor Janet Jones, proprietor of Source Booksellers, as captured by Noah Stephens for his photodocumentary project, The People of Detroit.

Noah started the project in response to a Dateline NBC expose on the city that profiled a man who hunts, cooks and sells raccoons. "The implication being, of course, that things are so dire in Detroit that raccoon meat has become a staple food," explained Noah. "Well, I grew up on welfare in the city. I've never eaten 'coon, nor have any of my friends."

Frustrated that national media coverage wasn't representative of his experience, Noah started chronicling the people he encountered in his daily life in Detroit.

His portraits are beautiful. This might be my favorite. Janet is as warm and wonderful as she looks here.

Most Detroiters share Noah's frustration with Detroit's representation in the media. A million local writers and bloggers have opined about it, so I won't waste too much time or space echoing their frustration. 


But one of my personal annoyances has been with the nomenclature of revitalization. If I had my way, the following words would be stricken from all journalists' vocabulary:

Frontier.

Pioneer.

Blank Canvas.

Clean Slate.

I understand why these words are used, but none of them are right. They suggest a "nothingness" that entirely misses the point of why anyone I know lives in Detroit. No place with hundreds of years of history and hundreds of thousands of residents is "blank."

I'm not here because there is nothing here. I am here because of people like Janet. Her bookstore on West Willis is one of the several reasons I chose to live and work where I do. So when any reporter asks me if I see Detroit as a "blank canvas," or mistakenly calls me an "urban pioneer," I try to correct them. I am following in the footsteps of many, many people who came before.

As artist Chazz Miller reminded me recently, "There's no new idea under the sun. It's just up to us to put our own view on them."

Which is why I'm a big fan of what Noah's doing. Not only is he a talented photographer with a refreshing point of view, he's also a pretty smart dude. With each portrait, he writes a little story. His story about Janet is so right on, I just gotta share it here:

"I used to live up the street from Miss Jones' establishment. I would stop in from time to time. Miss Jones would ask how I was doing and I would reply enthusiastically that I was 'Ahh, ya know. Still not dead...'  

The conversation would often shift to the state of affairs in Detroit. I would complain about how un-cosmopolitan Detroit was; how businesses closed too early in the day; how there was a general lack of ethnic, cultural, and intellectual diversity. I would then fantasize to Miss Jones about moving to some other shining, bustling metropolis that had everything Detroit lacked. Maybe then I would feel more like I was living as opposed to just circumventing death.

After all my bellyaching, Miss Jones would just matter-of-factly reply,  

'No matter where you go, there you are.’"

-Noah Stephens via The People of Detroit.