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Dave Jordano’s rediscovered photographs show how time can change the way a creator sees early work. In 1972, the photography student spent about a year documenting everyday life around Detroit, then put most of the negatives away. When he found them again in 2013, more than forty years later, many images were new to him—and better than he remembered.
How Jordano’s photographs disappeared—and resurfaced
In early 1972, Jordano was 24 and studying photography at Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies. He spent roughly a year photographing in and around the city with a 35mm camera. He printed some pictures for school assignments, but most negatives went into books. He did not make contact sheets for much of the work, and the books followed him through moves before ending up in storage.
Jordano rediscovered the negatives in 2013. Among them were many photographs he had never printed. He was surprised by their quality and by the observational skill they showed. In his artist statement for All About Photo, he described the pleasure of seeing them anew: “To reacquaint myself with this work has been a most satisfying experience, knowing that I’m the creator of the work and taking full credit, but in many ways because of the distance in time from when I took these pictures, it can almost feel as if someone else had tripped the shutter, and not me, but knowing it was me in my earlier career, has been a real pleasure getting to know them again.”
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What the photographs show about Detroit in 1972
The pictures gather moments of public and everyday life rather than telling a single story of a city in decline or recovery. They include diners, Greektown, storefronts, carnivals, car events, children, workers and street performers. One image records an anti-war rally involving Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.
#1 Best Overall
All About Photo places the work in a period of social change, five years after Detroit’s 1967 uprising. The scenes are specific glimpses, not a comprehensive account of the city or its residents. Their strength is in the particular encounters Jordano noticed while walking with his camera.
Why old work can look different with distance
Jordano’s experience suggests a modest but useful lesson for photographers and other creators: work that once felt familiar, unfinished or unremarkable can become newly legible after time away. Distance may make it easier to see choices and qualities that were hard to recognize while making the work. For Jordano, some photographs felt almost as if another person had taken them, even though he knew they were his and took responsibility for them.
Rank #2
That is an invitation to revisit an archive, not a promise that every abandoned project will contain a hidden breakthrough. A useful first step is simply to look again without demanding that the work justify the time spent on it. Old files, prints or notebooks can preserve evidence of what you noticed and how your eye was developing, even when they do not become a finished project.
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The selection is presented as The Year I Arrived, an online All About Photo Solo Exhibition competition winner running October 1–31, 2026. The exhibition page provides the organizer’s description and access to the photographs: The Year I Arrived by Dave Jordano. The listing establishes an online exhibition; it does not establish that exhibition prints or a catalog are available for purchase.
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Rank #4
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