Beautifully Mashed-Up Photos Show The Glory And Wreckage Of Detroit
The Detroit Now and Then project artfully combines vintage photos of the city with images of what’s there now, providing a poignant reminder of what the city was, what it is now and--maybe--what it could be again.
Several years after the original Cass Tech High School in downtown Detroit was abandoned, a local photographer sifting through the ruins found decades of the school’s storied history in the chaos of what had been the yearbook room on the fourth floor. In a cabinet that had largely shielded the trove from water damage, he found boxes and boxes of loose photos and developed film taken throughout the school’s life.
Al--and this is not his real name--smuggled the images out over three or four trips and digitized them before turning over the originals to the school’s alumni association. The images show students, in black-and-white, seated in the library, or, more recently, mugging for the camera in full color in front of their lockers. Al later returned to the school with dozens of these photos and an “elderly” Canon camera in hand, trying
