I’m a third-generation Detroiter. Mom worked in a bank; Dad worked on the assembly line in the auto industry as his dad did before him. I’m from the West Side. Most of our neighbours knew one another, and contrary to the narratives people often hear, there were many families on our street and a genuine sense of community. The neighbourhood wasn’t perfect, but there was a sense of pride in hardworking middle-class life. So I try to look for glimmers of that pride. Sometimes it’s manifest on the faces of Detroiters just going about their lives on the street; other times it’s in the physical place itself, in the beauty of Detroit spaces and the energy of the city.

These images have a lot of dimensionality to them. I shot architecture because I wanted to see how iPhone 12 Pro performs with extreme highlights and extreme shadows in the same image. Without needing to edit the images, they pop right away.

I think of Blackness as a shared socioeconomic bond that is almost universally understood by Black people. It’s “Joy and Pain,” as Frankie Beverly would sing. It’s a legacy of surviving and even thriving despite certain forces that would perhaps rather not even see us exist. It’s in the way we attack problems, and it’s in our intellectual view of the world around us. It’s the good that we’ve built and the bad that we’ve endured, which makes us defiant toward opposing forces but also sympathetic to individuals we don’t even know. It’s a mutual appreciation that we are collectively running the same gauntlet, no matter what city we live in. Black is joy and pain.

–Brian Day, Detroit

Brian Day’s Work Around Detroit