The Street Portraits of Carlos Diaz

Photographer Carlos Diaz approached me a while back about writing something for a show he was mounting at the Detroit Historical Museum of images he took in 1984 during the Detroit Tigers run up to winning that year's World Series Pennant. I've known Carlos for many years, almost back to when he first started teaching at College for Creative Studies 40 years ago. In 1991, I wrote a review for Detroit Focus Quarterly of an installation he did at the Pontiac Creative Art Center called The Unemployed Auto Worker. I also included it in an exhibition I curated that year at Buckham Fine Arts Project in Flint. (The other artists in the show were Robert Bielat and Lynne Avadenka.) I like to rib Carlos about that review as it was initially pitched to Artforum when I was doing reviews from Detroit for them. The review focused on issues of class raised in Carlos's installation, which went against the grain of so much contemporary art of the period that foregrounded identity politics, as it continues to do. The Artforum reviews editor sat on the piece for months until he declared it "stale" and therefore too far past its prime to be published. That seemed like bullshit to me, having waited similar periods for reviews to see the light of day at Artforum, Art in America, and other art magazines I had written for. The editor sidestepped the issue of class in our conversation, but coincidentally my career at Artforum ended after that. (Click here to read the article, which was published in Detroit Focus Quarterly.) At any rate, below is the essay I wrote for the Detroit Historical Museum exhibition, which is on view until November 17, 2024. I thank Carlos for the opportunity to do this piece and for permission to reproduce his work. (All images Ⓒ Carlos Diaz.)

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Carlos Diaz, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A Professor Emeritus of Photography at College for Creative Studies, Carlos Diaz has focused his lens on the world around him for more than four decades. In addition to a sustained and distinguished career as a practitioner, with many exhibitions and inclusion in museum collections to his name, he has mentored several generations of students onto professional success, many to national acclaim. The photographs in this exhibition were taken in the fall of 1984 when a young Diaz, not long out of graduate school at University of Michigan, obtained his first full-time teaching job and relocated to Hamtramck. The setting for these images was the three home games played by the Detroit Tigers in pursuit of the World Series Championship, which they won. The Tiger baseball season of that year was a galvanizing one for the city, not unlike this past fall and winter with the Detroit Lions nearly clinching the NFC Championship and a first-time trip to the Super Bowl.

An abiding concern for Diaz has been what he terms his “interest in the fluidity of history and memory, the connections between people and place.” The relationship between photography and memory is one often considered in the literature on the medium and with the fortieth anniversary of the Tigers’ triumph, the photographs in this exhibition provide an apt occasion to reflect on the connection.

In talking about his work, Diaz speaks of the moment early on in his development when he first saw the work of Diane Arbus, whose photographs often surveyed the margins of society. With that encounter, he recognized that photography could be more than documentary. “A photograph is a secret about a secret,” Arbus once observed, a comment about all that we don’t know about the subject of an image beyond what is visible within the frame. In the mid-1980s, Diaz explored this notion in a series titled “Unknown Landmarks,” where he went around the city with an 8x10 view camera searching locations and taking time to frame and consciously photograph otherwise mundane locations to question what might constitute the significant places and events we choose to remember, and more important those that are chosen to be memorialized from an official perspective.

One of those images, Residential Parking Lot and Modern Coliseum, Detroit, MI, 1984, is in this exhibition. It depicts Tiger Stadium just visible behind a commercial building in the background, with an alleyway between two Corktown houses in the foreground leading the eye to it. It is significant that Diaz used the medieval Latin spelling of “colosseum” in the title, connecting the now-gone ballpark in Detroit with the famous ruin in ancient Rome. The image evokes memories of spectacles – past and present – that have always been part of the public consciousness, fables of legendary contestants, victories and defeats, and the joys and disappointments of spectators, and the ultimate transience of those events and experiences, destined to be replayed again and again in different forms and different places and times.

Street photography, the genre of which Diaz’s 1984 Tigers World Series portraits are a part, seeks to capture chance encounters, typically in public places, rendered as “perfect moments.” It differs from documentary photography, which often operates with a predetermined message as in Jacob Riis’s late 19th-century photographs of the squalid conditions of the inhabitants of tenements in New York City in How the Other Half Lives. It is similarly distinct from photojournalism, which also tends to work in public places but with the intent of capturing perfect moments in the form of newsworthy events. For photojournalism, a perfect moment in October 1984 was Tigers right fielder Kirk Gibson swatting his World Series clinching home run in game 5. And yet, street photography can never be entirely free of the medium’s traditional documentary foundation as what Susan Sontag, in her famous book On Photography, terms “a trace, something stenciled directly off the real.”

In Diaz’s street photographs, it’s often the incidental that constitutes the perfect moment, details that evoke collective memory that may or may not have become part of “official” history. In a photograph in which the ballpark figures prominently, there is a billboard on the right promoting radio personality Dick Purtan, who was once one of America’s top on-air celebrities and who just a few years before had moved from his longtime spot in AM radio to the easy-listening format of “Cozy FM.” Still living, Purtan retired from the public airwaves in 2010. To the left is an ad for the Detroit People Mover, which had begun construction the year before and began service in 1987. Rendered idealistically in the ad, the Detroit People Mover promised to be a solution, if admittedly modest, to the city’s public transit woes, still yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Carlos Diaz, Cap, Button, and Bumper Sticker Vendor, Detroit Tigers Stadium, 1984 World Series, Detroit, MI, 1984.

A major aspect of the moment captured by Diaz’s World Series photographs is the carnivalesque atmosphere that surrounded the ballpark on game days, when the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull and the surrounding neighborhoods bustled with activity. Conspicuous among the people Diaz photographed are vendors hawking their wares, including popcorn, peanuts, and other food items at prices that were likely lower than similar items available inside the ballpark, as well as a variety of Tigers-branded merchandise, all of it undoubtedly unauthorized by the team’s management. There is a photograph that focuses on a makeshift parking lot, one of many that would pop up for home games, providing locals an opportunity to take in a little cash off sports fans on their way to the stadium visible in the background. These images reflect a spirit of do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism that once ruled on the streets around the stadium.

Carlos Diaz, Detroit Tigers Fan, 1984.

And then there are the fans. A notable image captures a fan blowing a hunting horn and wearing a batting helmet; he holds up a makeshift placard that reads “Trammel, Morris, MVPs” with another, “Tigers Win Debate,” strapped around his neck. (Tigers shortstop Alan Trammel and pitcher Jack Morris were inducted together into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2018.) Another depicts a crew of three self-assured adolescent boys striking a pose, arms folded, looking straight into the camera, wearing matching caps with “The A-Team” printed across the crown.

In this age of the ubiquitous selfie, the perfect moment appears to be not an appreciation of an event but the tagging of one’s presence for which the event serves merely as a backdrop. With this series of photographs, Carlos Diaz turned his camera away from himself to bear witness to some perfect moments of a few glory days gone by.

Detroit Artists Market: The First 80 Years

Artists Matthew Lasinski, Hughie Lee-Smith, and Fred Papsdorf (left to right) helping move the Detroit Artists Market to its 110 Madison Street location in 1956. (Credit: Detroit Times, January 31, 1956. Image courtesy of Detroit Artists Market.)

Since 1932, the Detroit Artists Market has provided a venue for local artists to present their work. Indeed, just about every artist of note to come out of the city since then has shown at DAM at one time or another, many having been introduced to the public under its auspices. In fact, according to a tally being compiled by Board Member Vice-Chair and longtime Detroit artist Gary Eleinko, more than 3,200 artists have shown there over the years, including Hughie Lee-Smith, who got his start at DAM, Harry Bertoia, and Richard DeVore. To help celebrate its 80th anniversary, the Detroit Artists Market is the subject of an exhibition at the Detroit Historical Museum titled "Detroit Artists Market: the First 80 Years." Installed in the museum's Community Gallery, it's an exhibition that's well worth seeing.

Mrs. H. Lee (Mildred) Simpson,
"Woman of the Week,"
Detroit Free Press
December 20, 1942.
(Courtesy Detroit Artists Market.)

As the story goes, DAM was founded in a garden in Grosse Pointe during the Great Depression as a venue for artists to exhibit and sell their work. The founders, led by socialite Mildred (or as she preferred to be known, Mrs. H. Lee) Simpson, included several of the city's cultural elite who were also patrons of the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, the support organization behind what is now College for Creative Studies. At first restricted to exhibiting artists under age 30, DAM soon became a space for showcasing those who were both emerging and established.

DAM's first location was 1432 Farmer Street near Grand Circus Park, a site now occupied by the downtown Detroit YMCA. The next year, it moved two blocks over to Witherell Street on the park's southeast circular edge, where it remained for more than two decades. When I first showed there in the 1980s, DAM was at 1452 Randolph, overlooking Harmonie Park, a space it occupied for just over three decades beginning in 1961. After a few years at Stroh River Place in the '90s, it ended up at the corner of Woodward and Forest in the Cultural Center where it remains today.

The exhibition at the Historical Museum is installed salon style and features more than 130 works created over DAM's history. It's organized chronologically with groupings that represent the artists being shown at each of the six locations it occupied over the years. Things are literally brought full circle by two paintings installed next to one another in a corner, the one a view of Washington Boulevard by Amy Lorimer painted in 1934 and the other, Detroit Night by Darcel Deneau, hot off the easel having been completed just this year. It's all a bit cluttered but fitting given DAM's traditional egalitarian stance in presenting work. An unfortunate but necessary concession to the room is the installation of a large number of works, generally it seems those considered the most valuable, in a floor-to-ceiling glassed-in display case that takes up more than half of one of the gallery's cramped walls. As a whole, though, the exhibition provides an interesting snapshot of the art created, shown, and collected in Detroit for a good part of the 20th century.

Given its founding date, it's not surprising that the early period reflects the aesthetics of the American Scene, which had a strong influence in the Midwest and in Detroit in the time between the two World Wars. The earliest painting in the show, a view of an Indian pueblo in Santa Clara, was done by Zoltan Sepeshy in 1926, five years before he became a painting instructor at Cranbrook Academy of Art, a post from which he propagated the aesthetics of the American Scene to young artists first as an artist-in-residence and then as Director, replacing Eliel Saarinen after the architect's death in 1950. Also represented is Edgar Louis Yaeger, who in 1935 joined the Works Progress Administration/Federal Artists Project, completing murals for the Public Lighting Commission in Detroit, Grosse Pointe City Hall, Children's Hospital (since destroyed), and the Ford School in Highland Park among other public commissions.

Magnolias, 1947, by self-taught artist Fred Papsdorf sets the style for the artist's later work and features the artist's original-made frame.  His first solo show took place at DAM in 1938; in the 1940s and 1950s he showed nationally and was featured in Art Digest, Art News, and other publications. (Image courtesy of Pat Glascock and Michael Hall.)

DAM has also supported more avant-garde pursuits, having mounted the exhibition "Abstract Art is Reality" in 1952 organized by legendary Futurist collector Lydia Winston Malbin, daughter of Albert Kahn, who along with Hilla Rebay, the Alsacean baroness and artist who helped found the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (originally the Museum of Non-Objective Art) in New York City, had pioneered the exhibition of abstract art in Detroit a decade earlier. And in the aftermath of the 1967 civil unrest, DAM presented the exhibition "Seven Black Artists" curated by Kresge Arts in Detroit Eminent Artist Charles McGee. In later years, DAM showcased performance art, installation, and intermedia. There is also a bit of the more peripheral elements of the local scene. In particular, there is a really nice painting titled Magnolias from 1947 by Fred Papsdorf, known as "The Milkman Painter of Detroit" and "The American Rousseau," a self-taught artist who was discovered at age 49 in the late 1930s at a Saturday drawing class by School of the Arts and Crafts professor Sarkis Sarkisian (also represented in the show) and who went on to show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Institute, as well as with the Perls Gallery in New York.

Many exhibitions also featured catalogs documenting the work and other ephemera, examples of which are presented in a vitrine in the center of the gallery space. (It's too bad, a travesty really, that there isn't a catalog for this show, though a video presentation of photos and newspaper articles provides some context.) There are also some fine samples of the work of Ed Fella, made while he was still in the process of transitioning from Detroit advertising hack (known back in the day as "The King of Zing") to internationally recognized typographical deconstructionist and postmodern graphic design guru.

For those of us of a certain vintage, DAM is noteworthy for its early support of the Motor City's very own first avant-garde, the Cass Corridor movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. There's a nice if modest example of the style by Bradley Jones and another by the group's mentor John Egner, plus the reverberations of its influence on artists, such as Gilda Snowden, who came later on. One of the vexing aspects of the exhibition is that even though one appreciates and values the intent of the broad survey, too many of the artists are represented by relatively minor work due to restrictions of space and, one presumes, budget. Fortunately, in the case of the Cass Corridor there is an opportunity to see some more ambitious examples of the style at the N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition "Menage a Detroit: Three Generations of Expressionist Art in Detroit, 1970-2012" curated by Dennis Alan Nawrocki (more on that to come).

While you're checking out the Historical Museum show, make sure to take in the current offering at DAM, the "Biannual All Media Exhibition 2012" juried by Leon Johnson. It's a good glimpse of some of the more cutting-edge work now being done in Detroit and a fitting way to bring the view of DAM up to the present moment. You likely won't recognize that many of the 26 names whose work is represented. But that's exactly as it should be as DAM carries on.

Save the Poets, 2012, (painted found Shakespeare books, wood, spackle, charcoal) by Barbara Dorchen is one of the works by 26 emerging and established artists featured in the Detroit Artists Market "Biannual All Media Exhibition 2012." (Image courtesy of the artist.)

"Detroit Artists Market: The First 80 Years" is on view at the Detroit Historical Museum, 5401 Woodward Ave. at Kirby in Detroit until May 24. For more information, call (313) 833-1805 or visit http://www.detroithistorical.org. The Biannual All Media Exhibition runs at Detroit Artists Market, 4719 Woodward at Forest, also until May 24. Call (313) 832-8540 or visit http://detroitartistsmarket.org for details.


Correction: This post reflects a correction on the date of the "Abstract Art is Reality" exhibition. The exhibition of abstract art co-curated by Lydia Winston Malbin and Hilla Rebay that took place in 1942 was mounted at the Women's City Club. The DAM show took place in 1952 as reported by Michael Hodges in his Detroit News article on the show at the Detroit Historical Museum.