The wonderful Dave Jordano has been a long time observer of Detroit, the city where he was born and traversed with a 35mm as a student, onto a 4×5, and today uses digital capture to document the changing landscape of a city in flux.  On February 3rd, I will be featuring a new project on Detroit that Dave will be exhibiting at the United Photo Industries Gallery in Brooklyn.

It has been a privilege to have this week’s photographers share their early work, and as Dave comments, it can be a somewhat cathartic experience to go through your older work and recognize how connected it is to today.

Dave was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1948 received his degree in photography from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 1974. After moving to Chicago in 1977 he established a successful freelance commercial photography studio for 30 years. Specializing in food and product photography, he shot major campaigns for national and international clients. Since his return to fine art/documentary photography Jordano was awarded an honorable mention in the Houston Center for Photography’s Long Term Fellowship Project in 2003, and received the Curator’s Choice Award the following year. In 2006, 2008, and 2013 he was shortlisted as a finalist in the Photolucia “Critical Mass” national book award in Portland, OR. He was also selected for inclusion in “One Hundred Portfolios”, a competition sponsored by Wright State University, Dayton, OH, featuring the work of 100 leading photographers from around the world. In 2009, his first book, titled “Articles of Faith” was published by The Center for American Places at Columbia College, which coincided with a major exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.

His work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, at Northwestern University, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Harris Bank Collection and many corporate and private collections. Jordano is represented by following galleries; Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA, Photoeye.com, Stieglitz 19 Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium, and Zemma Agency in Moscow, Russia.

I rediscovered these early 35mm photographs after they had been sitting in a cabinet for the past forty years.  For me, they represent a record of daily life from a time far removed from what we know today, but in many ways they feel very contemporary to me, or at least in relation to my own sensibilities and view about life at the time. This is what is conflicting to me because it makes me feel that I haven’t really changed much over the years. There relevance lies more in my own self-assessment in how the work relates to my development as a photographer and my point of view.  Apart from that I think the photographs are certainly interesting and still engage the viewer to look into them for meaning, regardless of how old they are.