Professor of English, Director of Honors Program,
Wayne State University

And all of this stuff exists only because most of us left the city, and left behind a vast amount of empty space where people used to live and work and shop, but don’t any longer, so that for those who still do live there, or maybe others who just arrived, maybe because they don’t know enough to know that they’re supposed to aspire to something better, the sensation of all this blankness is a little disturbing. It’s a challenge figuring out what to make of so much emptiness, where over half the population just got up and walked away. Not that Detroit is unique in this way. It’s just like every other American metropolis, only more so. So much more so, in fact, that it can seem, sometimes, like a singular case, which of course it is not, although this latter point is largely misunderstood.

Which is precisely where David Clements comes in, and where the real genius of his project lies. Just exactly in what it is not. Lots of people have taken pictures of cities; ever since photography and, later, movies have existed, cities have played a starring role. Lately, that role has tended toward nostalgia for past glories, and cautionary advice about present calamities. A regular cottage industry has sprung up, in fact, producing Matrix-like images of empty American cities, as if that’s something most of us need to be reminded of—that cities are not where the majority of Americans live, with the result that a whole lot of wasting has gone on, of things and lives that we’ve abandoned. And this is what David Clements is—admirably and adamantly—not doing. His pictures are not just another re-hash of urban abandonment and devastation, of the “ruin” we’ve made of our cities. His pictures aren’t like this because they aren’t really pictures of the city at all. Not really. What Clements has photographed is signs—messages about the city that are meant to be read.

Now, it’s no accident, of course, that he found these signs where he did because conditions there have made certain kinds of message-writing necessary. Take Detroit, for example, where over two million people used to live, and which just over 900,000 presently call home. Because of that great out-migration, there’s a lot of available, empty space for painting. More than that, there’s a great need for signing, called for by the puzzle of our collective behavior. Again, taking Detroit as an example, there’s the fact that almost 5 million Americans live near the city, in the greater agglomeration the Census Bureau refers to as “Detroit,” yet most of those people whose lives are made possible because Detroit exists, are intent upon not living in it, or even visiting—many of them—not if they can help it. It’s that distinctly perverse American attitude toward the city and the kinds of history cities embody, that invites the signing that goes on, back in town, unofficially for the most part, because people need to make sense of the puzzle they inhabit. Which is precisely what they have done.

And that is just what Clements’ photos represent: the vernacular signing that goes on, back in town, unofficially, because people need to tell each other what’s happening: for reasons of commerce, or entertainment, or politics, or God, or maybe just to preserve a personal image of a face that will have meaning only to a few. These are signs born of local necessity and exuberance; they are hand made, on site, not the result of anonymous, corporate installation. Because there’s so much to make up for, to cover, in this shamefully uncovered city, the signs can undertake an expansiveness of dimension and color that is truly profligate, and admirable. Commercial buildings become wholesale advertisements of themselves, with every surface covered by messages, like at the Duck Tales Candy Shop, or Eastside Check Cashing, with its mural of Detroit social and political history presided over by the shimmering presence (as if looking down from heaven) of former mayor Coleman Young, and then those depression era hipsters escaping, it seems, from a hold-up staged on the very store the sign advertises, dollar bills blowing every which way in the breeze. Or Mr. Fixit auto repair shop, with it amazing cubist cars sprawling across the entire building. “We do other things too!!” the sign promises, taking time out to include an image of the Bible, with a citation of Psalm 23.

What Clements is not doing here is making art, or politics, or irony out of somebody else’s necessity or naiveté, which would be easy enough, at the Paris ‘N Soul Food, for instance, with its crude image of a chef and Webber grill set up next to the Eiffel Tower; or the resale shop, “New Old Used Resale Ideals,” the sign reads. Or Pepps Under Water car wash, with the vast murals of cars being washed, on the sea floor, by a crew of hot looking women in hip boots and bikini tops. Clements was there for the shocking pink grand opening of Yetta Boo’s: “Boobs & Bunns Hand Car Wash.” But what he is not doing is turning this or any of his other texts to trade; he’s not making fun; he’s not trying to be a “great” photographer either, in the way that photographers aspire to, after the examples of Dorothea Lange, say, or Walker Evans, or later, in the deconstructive mode of Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand. Maybe it’s because there are almost never any people in Clements’ photos that he avoids getting into personal issues of the gaze, and whose gaze it is being sponsored. That’s what he has chosen not to do; it’s the signs he’s interested in, rather than the people who made them.

And this separates his work from the connoisseurship that attends so-called outsider art, of the sort a less interesting spectator than Clements might subject his signs to. He’s not trying to be anyplace except inside the world these signs come from, which accounts for a certain lush repetitiveness of technique. He seems to have photographed everything on the same day at the same time with the same light, each image rich with the same depth of color. He fills the frame up to the edge with his signs, just as the signs themselves fill up the available spaces of walls and building fronts. There is no getting outside the frame in this visual world. This is a technique that strives for and achieves the opposite of technique in the sense that all the images share with the signs an apparent un-self-consciousness: the same un-self-consciousness of a touristic photo, snapped for reasons of recording a memory, rather than making something of it that’s about more than the information contained inside the frame. Take Flagg’s Soul Food Deli and Grill, “Food so good . . . gotta take yo’ shoes off to eat.” Clements never smirks or tips the wink.

Of course, Clements’ images are not un-self-conscious; they only seem that way, which is the triumph of his technique, just as it is a measure of his awareness of what he is doing that he’s planted a shrewd running joke in all his texts. And the joke is on us—most of us, at any rate. No matter how superior the viewer may feel to the art and the messages here—the crude altar with the inscription “God word is sharp as a two edges saw”—we end up wanting something that Clements and his photos are going to withhold knowingly, because they can. We can’t help wanting to know more: Where are the signs exactly? What is the neighborhood like? Who painted the images? Could you pull the camera back so I can see who’s here? Who made the text? Are these places still there? I guess Clements might say it doesn’t matter, that these are irrelevant questions. That he’s not interested, or doesn’t have the time to find such stuff out. It would be wrong, however, to attribute his withholding to naiveté or laziness. Instead, I think he’s turning the tables quite wonderfully on the superiority of the viewer. It’s not the sign painters and vernacular muralists who are “outsiders”; it’s us. We’re the ones on the outside, who aren’t going to be allowed to know things that only come from living here.

But I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything mean spirited or snide about what Clements is doing. Just the opposite. His procedure is all about respect and ownership, and an advocacy that is no less admirable than it is necessary. Which is to say he’s playing a joke, but it’s a well-intentioned joke, with implications for photographs and cities alike. The joke is about the kind of phony “rights” that outsiders sometimes feel they’re entitled to because of what they know, or where they’re from, which gets back to Thoreau, and his dread of people who are always working their knowledge without ever confronting the ignorance their sense of superiority is based on. It would be possible, certainly, to make something else out of Clements’ signs: to place them in a context other than the one history has chosen on the streets of Detroit; to turn them into statements about visual culture; or to appropriate them academically, as texts requiring professorial interpretation, or art-historically, as objects of attribution and conservatorship. But those are wrong choices, according to Clements, which is his reason for withholding the information necessary to proceed along those lines, just as I believe he would find it a wrong choice to talk about the city—whether Detroit or any other city—as if wasn’t first of all about the needs of the people who live there, as opposed to the things people can imagine they know about the city who don’t live there.

That’s why his choice of signs is so right, and so smart and not naïve. The things Clements has taken pictures of all have a purpose of their own, prior to their being photographed, which in this case raises more questions than it settles, as I’ve suggested. And it’s those questions that bear thinking about, once the touristic pleasure of looking at these photos has run its course. That’s the point another master of faux naïve commentary pointed out, famously, in the “Notice” that opens Huckleberry Finn. “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted,” Mark Twain wrote; “persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot” (4). Not that readers haven’t done all those things, and not that Twain didn’t fully expect they would, and even want them to. His point, and I think it might well be Clements’ point too, is that when people start exercising their knowledge on a thing that somebody else has made, they at least ought to be clear about whose needs are being served.

Works Cited

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Ed. Stephen Fender. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 3rd ed. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: Norton, 1999.