Detroit

Detroit occupies a particular place in this archive, and not only as a subject. The Detroit Publishing Company was headquartered here, and it was one of the largest photographic publishers in the country — the source of tens of thousands of images of American places, made using the Photochrom process that turned black-and-white negatives into color prints. A great deal of what Americans knew their own country looked like came out of this city.

So Detroit photographed everywhere, and it also photographed itself.

The Model T arrived in 1908 and the moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913. The line cut the build time for a car from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. Photographs of it are among the most reproduced industrial images ever made, and they were taken deliberately — Ford understood publicity and kept photographers on staff.

The five-dollar day came in 1914, roughly double the going wage, and it drew people from across the South and from Europe. Detroit's population went from under three hundred thousand in 1900 to over one and a half million by 1930. Photographs from those decades show a city adding neighborhoods faster than it could name them.

Woodward Avenue runs from the river to the northern suburbs and organizes most of the street photography. Downtown at Campus Martius, the department stores, the theaters. The Fox opened in 1928 and seated five thousand.

Belle Isle sits in the Detroit River, an island park laid out with advice from Frederick Law Olmsted. The conservatory, the canals, the casino — Sunday photographs from Belle Isle are the counterweight to the factory images and they are the ones that show what the money bought.

The river itself is worth attention. Detroit faces Canada, and Windsor is to the south, which surprises people. The ferries, the freighters and later the Ambassador Bridge of 1929 all appear.

The City Where the Country Was Argued Into Existence