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Beauty In Despair

Julia Reyes Taubman's photographic images
capture the city that Detroit is.

Vigo 'Street and Wesson Avenue on Detroill s West Side. The city

oozes with the rpsidue,of humanity," ReyeS Taubman writes in the

Acknowledgethents section of

Suzanne Chessler

Contributing Writer

J ulia Reyes Taubman did not grow
up in Detroit, but she believes she
knows the city better than any
longtime Metro dweller.
In recent years, accompanied by a Leica
or Nikon D700 camera and often other
people, Reyes Taubman drove street to
street, building to building, vacated lot to
vacated lot and took digital pictures.
Her collection includes images of the
Renaissance Center but many more
images of abandoned properties strewn
with discards of moved-on lives.
There is the majestic home built by the
late clothing retailer Benjamin Siegel, but
more numerous are scenes of unidentified
modest homes left neglected in neighbor-
hoods once identified with the Jewish
community.
Perhaps most dramatically, there are the
iconic spaces, sadly forgotten, like emptied
giant auto factories desperate for atten-
tion.
Reyes Taubman, who began her urban
camera work to suggest backdrops for a
fashion magazine camera shoot, now is
calling attention to these sites and many
more through a hefty book filled with 454
diverse pictures, sorted down from some
35,000.
Proceeds from the sale of Detroit: 138
Square Miles go to its publisher, MO CAD
(Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit),
where Reyes Taubman was a founder and
serves as board chairman.
The self-described photo documentar-

.

ian, not photo artist, is pleased that her
book, released in January, already is in its
second printing.
"I'd never seen a book like this one, and
it has been the privilege of my life to be
able to photograph the city that Detroit
is," says Reyes Taubman, 44, who moved to
Michigan in 1999 after marrying shopping
center developer Robert Taubman.
"I never started off thinking I would do
a book, and I can't believe how compre-
hensive it is!"
Reyes Taubman, who has been involved
with activities at Cranbrook Academy
of Art and an outdoor lighting project
at Temple Beth El, experienced her first
far-reaching emotional impact of the city
while visiting an emptied Packard factory.
She was with a group of people that
included Dennis Friedman, W magazine
creative director, who later brought model
Kate Moss and photographer Bruce Weber
to town and came up with a 20-page
spread that ran in 2007.
"I thought there couldn't be a building
equivalent to the Packard plant:' recalls
Reyes Taubman, who built a career in
commercial real estate and kept advanc-
ing her personal interest in architecture
and history. "It's almost a mile long on two
sides, and most of it is intact.
"What I think is important about that
plant is not what you see now but what it
represents to manufacturing in general.
It was built in the early part of the 20th
century and so much of what we learned
about manufacturing is there.
"I kept trying to figure out the best way
to photograph it because I couldn't believe

Detroit: 138 Seftiare Miles.

Ford's Highland Park Plant, designed by Albert Kahn; in 1913, it became the first

automobile production facility in the world to implement the assembly line. "I think
Albert Kahn probably is the most important American architect, yet he's vastly
overlooked," Reyes Taubman says.

Ivanhoe
Cafe, also

known as
the Polish

Yacht Club,
, on Detroit's

East Side,
established

1909.

Beauty on page 50

February 9 • 2012

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