Review by Douglas Stockdale •
Notes: The investigation of an urban man-built landscape can be a sociological study of those who live in it as part of a photo-documentary practice. Dave Jordano adds another couple of more layers to the study of his subject, the city of Detroit. His visual framing of this urban landscape is from the adjacent byways of this city, a version of street photography which in this case only a few individuals are observed. Second is the time of day he creates this urban investigation, or perhaps more succinctly, a project created in the wee hours between sunset and when the sun rises again. A time when things might go bump in the night.
For the most part of this study Jordano focuses on the aging structures of Detroit that are illuminated by a variety of lighting, both the natural moon lite sky as well as the various industrial, commercial neon, residential and street lights. The combination of lighting sources creates interesting color palette to an already colorful city and the occasional sharply delineated shadows make for an overall strangeness to his photographs. The night time lighting creates graphic shapes of this urban setting as the structures appear to flatten and visually break down to basic shapes, masses, blocks of color and lines. The overall effect might be best characterized as being surreal.
The capture of these lonely night-lite structures as a documentary practice attempts to reveal the underlying social order of this area. I am struck by a combination of visual humor mixed with moments of melancholy, as many of these photographs seem to reveal an underlying sadness about what is occurring in this region. Like Jordano, I grew up near these same locations many years ago, so viewing these mostly dated, sometimes seriously deteriorating, structures remind me of my own aging and mortality.
Dave Jordano has been previously featured on TPBJ: Detroit Unbroken Down
___________
Dave Jordano – A Detroit Nocturne, 2018
Photographer: Dave Jordano (born Detroit, MI, USA resides Chicago IL, USA)
Publisher: powerHouse Books
Essay, Foreword by Karen Irvine
Text: English with captions and pagination
Hardcover book with illustrated dust jacket, sewn binding, four-color lithography, printed and binding in China
Photobook designer: Sam Silvio
____________________
PhotoBook Journal 
Leave a Reply