'The Year I Arrived' by Dave Jordano

’The Year I Arrived’ by Dave Jordano
Oct 1, 2026 – Oct 31, 2026

Online
Los Angeles, CA

All About Photo presents The Year I Arrived by Dave Jordano, online from 1 through 31 October 2026. The exhibition honors the winner of the platform’s October Solo Exhibition competition with a selection of photographs made in and around Detroit in 1972, when Jordano was a 24-year-old student at the Center for Creative Studies. The pictures remained largely unseen for more than four decades, stored as negatives in books that followed him from move to move before their rediscovery in 2013.

Dave Jordano photographed for roughly a year with a 35mm camera, printing only a small number of images for school assignments. He never made contact sheets for much of the work, then put the negatives away and moved on. When he returned to them, he found photographs that exceeded his recollection of his early ability: candid, observant pictures of a young man moving through the pace and daily life of his home city. The passage of time gives the archive an unusual charge. Jordano recognizes the photographs as his own while encountering them with the distance of a stranger.

The images show Detroit in a period of profound social change, five years after the 1967 uprising and at a moment when the city was still defined by its industrial strength. Jordano does not pursue a grand narrative of decline or recovery. His attention remains with ordinary encounters: people at lunch counters, shoppers in Greektown, spectators at car events, a child at play, workers, street performers, and strangers caught in the modest theater of public life. An anti-war rally featuring Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden appears alongside scenes of diners, carnivals, storefronts, and sidewalks.

Born in Detroit in 1948, Jordano received his BFA in photography from the Center for Creative Studies in 1974. He established a commercial photography studio in Chicago in 1977, producing campaigns for companies including Crate & Barrel, Starbucks, Sears, Nestlé, Kraft Foods, Nintendo, and Kellogg’s. Since 2000, he has concentrated on fine-art documentary photography, building long-term projects around communities and places often reduced to shorthand accounts.

His books include Articles of Faith, documenting small African American storefront churches in Chicago; Detroit: Unbroken Down, a portrait of his hometown and its residents; and A Detroit Nocturne. His work is held by the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and The Block Museum of Art. In The Year I Arrived, an early archive becomes a record not simply of Detroit, but of a photographer learning how to see.

Image: Coffee Break, Bad Axe, Michigan © Dave Jordano


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