Michigan - Culture Issue

I spent my last day seeing some of downtown Detroit more up close and personal. We visited a farmers’ market, which was a nice little thing for a city’s market. It mostly consisted of stands selling flowers and vegetable plants for folks’ home gardens. We made a circuit about three times, trying to find nasturtiums. Well, I was looking for nasturtiums. Amanda had forgotten what they looked like and I figured I could find some. Alas, that was about the only flowering plant that wasn’t there. There were also a handful of overpriced “organic” plants that weren’t even old enough to be charged the amount people were asking. I guess that’s what it’s like in the city; people are willing to pay top dollar for a little green.

After a quick tour of the campus grounds that surrounded Wayne State University Graduate Library, I headed off to see the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Art. Adams is best known for his photos of landscapes, particularly of the West. However, in this exhibit, many of his other photos were on display. For instance, there were a couple of portraits he’d done, either on the fly, or for commission (he supplemented his art sales by doing photo-work for businesses and the movie industry) and some “abstract” pieces of still-lifes. The exhibit chronicled his career from some of the first pictures he’d taken in his teens to work he was doing in the seventies. He did a lot of early landscapes in a style known as pictorialism, in which the scenes were slightly blurred to make the picture look less realistic, and more like a painting. Later, in a complete turnaround, he started a group of photographers that devoted their time to developing scenes in utter sharpness. As a young photographer, he started by shooting landscapes for the Sierra Club, and he later worked for the Department of the Interior. I was impressed by so many of his pictures! He was good at composing landscapes and also shots on a much smaller scale. Some of my favorites were texture studies of stumps and plants, sometimes juxtaposed for contrast. I think my most favorite out of the whole exhibit, however, was a shot of Georgia O’Keefe and Orville Cox. It looked kind of silly, but very relaxed. It seemed to capture the friendship between those two, and even Adams who was obviously outside of the frame.

My next stop was to the Detroit Science Museum to see “Our Body: The Universe Within.” It was a little anticlimactic to me, but worth seeing. I think the guide said that 25 people’s bodies, which had been donated to science, were “plastinated,” a process by which the fat and fluids were replaced with a latex-like polymer, which later hardened after the bodies were posed in different positions. I think the greatest thing about that exhibit was that it presented the human body in a way that not many people get to see, unless they’re studying it. So often, people don’t realize just how complex we are inside. While approachable, that exhibit was quite educational and even light-hearted in a way.