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Visual Rhetoric - Visual Culture - Pedagogy
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Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan
Submitted by noelradley on Tue, 2010-02-16 14:28
Image Credit: Joel Sternfeld Via The Getty H/T Seeing and Writing 3 For the past few years, I have started my course using the Joel Sternfeld photograph above. Class members usually list as many observations as possible, and then we start to hazard inferences about what this photo signifies...what the items of this environment present. I have a heart for this image. The scene invites us to narrate, but it also refuses to tell us the whole story (one part of which is the police beating and death of Malice Green in 1992). Today, I was reading Laura Smith's latest post on Googlemap pedagogy, and I wondered what would happen if I put in the address, which is also the title of the photo: "Warren Avenue at 23rd Street, Detroit, Michigan, October 1993."
The search results in the map above, which I think shows some potential uses for Googlemaps streetview function as a way for students to connect to documentary photography. Does this help us locate the documentary photo? Does it give a greater sense of the place's materiality? Does this complicate or compound Sternfeld's original message about urban decay and social injustice? In what ways is the place the same, and how it is different? |
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a walk around the block
Noel, this is really interesting. I used the Street View feature to take a virtual walk around the block, and the emptiness of the neighborhood is shocking. Most blocks have only two or three houses on them, and some of those houses are obviously abandoned, burned out, etc. I went into Google's normal map mode to see where the neighborhood is located, and it's right in the middle of the city. This is a really complelling way of layering Detroit's many social and economic problems (depopulation, poverty, crime, racial disparity, etc.) on top of one another in a quick, visceral way. It's more than a little chilling.
Startling view
I also thought it was chilling, Coye. For me, it was mournful, because I realized some limitations to my understanding of the initial image. I guess I had a virtual imagination about the surrounding parts of the image. In my mind, there was a neighborhood. There were businesses and other homes, and there were pedestrians. My imagination didn't account for the reality, which is more isolated and more sad. It's interesting to see that the mural on the building is marked out but discernable. It's also interesting to see there is still grafitti that refers to the event "November 5" the anniversary of Malice Green's death.