All About Photo Presents 'When I Arrived' by Dave Jordano

In early 1972, at just twenty-four years old, Dave Jordano was a photography student at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Armed with a 35mm camera and the curiosity of someone still discovering what photography might mean to him, he began photographing in and around the city. For roughly a year, he moved through Detroit and its surrounding neighborhoods, making pictures as assignments for school but also simply because he was looking.

Most of those photographs were never printed. Instead, Jordano gathered the negatives into books and put them away. The books followed him through successive moves, repeatedly finding their way into cabinets and storage spaces, where they remained largely untouched. He did not even make contact sheets. More than forty years passed before he returned to them.

When Jordano rediscovered the negatives in 2013, he encountered something unexpected: a body of work that went far beyond the tentative experiments of a young photography student. What emerged was a remarkably assured visual language—an instinctive understanding of composition, timing, light and human gesture. Across these photographs, Jordano demonstrates an ability to recognize and capture the decisive moment: those fleeting, often unrepeatable instances when people, place and circumstance come together within the frame.

The power of the work is equally rooted in Jordano’s mastery of black and white. Rich tonal contrasts, subtle gradations of light and carefully observed textures give the photographs a distinctive visual strength. Whether photographing people at ease, encounters on the street or the unexpected arrangements of everyday Detroit, he transforms ordinary scenes into images charged with atmosphere, tension and human presence.

When I Arrived is, in many ways, a project about returning. It is a return to Detroit, but also to an earlier version of the photographer himself. The distance of more than four decades changes the nature of the images. They are no longer simply photographs made by a twenty-four-year-old student. They have become fragments of a life that can be revisited only through the evidence left behind on film.

What makes the work especially compelling is the absence of hindsight at the moment the photographs were made. Jordano was not yet the established photographer he would become. He was not consciously constructing a retrospective portrait of Detroit or attempting to make a definitive document of a particular period. He was simply moving through his surroundings with a camera, responding to what caught his attention—and repeatedly recognizing moments worth photographing.

That openness is visible throughout the work. There is an extraordinary attentiveness to ordinary life—to streets, buildings, people, gestures and fleeting arrangements that might easily have gone unnoticed. Yet these are not passive observations. Jordano’s camera finds order within the unpredictability of the street, isolating moments of humor, intimacy, tension and coincidence. The photographs feel spontaneous, but their strength comes from an increasingly sophisticated instinct for when to press the shutter.

Detroit in these photographs is therefore more than a backdrop. It is the environment through which Jordano was learning photography and, perhaps without realizing it, developing a way of seeing that would remain important throughout his career. The work records not only what the young photographer saw, but his remarkable ability to turn passing encounters into enduring photographs.

There is also something quietly mysterious about rediscovered photographs. Once enough time has passed, the photographer can become a kind of viewer alongside everyone else. Jordano knows he made them. He recognizes the circumstances and accepts responsibility for the photographs. Yet the decades between the act of photographing and the act of seeing again create a remarkable distance.

That distance is central to When I Arrived. Memory does not simply restore the past; it alters our relationship to it. A photograph can preserve a moment while allowing everything around that moment to disappear. Streets change. People age. Buildings vanish. Cities transform. The photographer changes too. What remains on the negative is a version of the world that can suddenly become visible again.

Perhaps this is what gives these photographs their particular emotional force. They were not made with the knowledge that they would survive for more than half a century. They were made before Jordano could know what kind of photographer he would become, before he could understand what these images might eventually mean. Their significance arrived later—but the photographic instinct was already there.

When I Arrived is consequently both an archive and a rediscovery. It offers a vivid portrait of Detroit in the early 1970s, while revealing the emergence of a photographer with a powerful command of black and white, an acute observational eye and an instinct for the decisive street moment. Looking at the work today means looking simultaneously at a city, a young photographer and the remarkable photographic voice that was already beginning to take shape.

There is something deeply moving in that encounter. The young Jordano went out with his camera simply to see what was there. Decades later, the older Jordano returned to discover just how much he had seen.

The photographs had been waiting for him.

When I Arrived by Dave Jordano is presented as part of All About Photo’s October 2026 Solo Exhibition.