This riveting father-son collaboration at the Library of Michigan in Lansing closes tomorrow.
By Bill Morris
While the author Michael Zadoorian was growing up in northwest Detroit, his father, Norman, supported the family by working as an industrial photographer for the Detroit Edison Co. In his spare time — lunch hours, nights, weekends — Norman prowled the city’s streets and shops and factories with Rolleiflex in hand, snapping away, amassing a rich and idiosyncratic portrait of the Motor City at its mid-20th-century peak.
His subjects included bustling sidewalks, empty alleys, lunch counters, car washes, supermarkets, pawn shops, electrocution victims, corporate executives, dentists, even elephants being marched to the Shrine Circus. His body of work carries echoes of both Eugène Atget’s misty portraits of a vanishing Paris and Robert Frank’s portraits of unrepentant, untamable Americans. And it captures a dreamy city bursting with postwar optimism, unaware that it was on the brink of a nightmarish fall.
Norman Zadoorian with his Speed Graphic camera in the late 1940s
A few years ago, Michael Zadoorian started posting some of his late father’s black-and-white photographs on his Facebook page.
“People really responded,” Michael recalls. “Last year I received the Michigan Author Award, and at the award ceremony the Librarian of Michigan, Randy Riley, suggested doing a show of my father’s photographs. I thought, why not?”
Michael spent six months poring through the thousands of negatives and prints his father left behind when he died at 83 in 2004. After selecting about four dozen photographs, Michael wrote explanatory wall cards that now appear in the father-son collaboration at the Library of Michigan in Lansing, “The Searching Eye: Images of Mid-Century Detroit.” The exhibit, which runs through Dec. 20, is divided into three parts.
PART ONE: Night and the City
Norman Zadoorian, a self-taught photographer, served as a U.S. Army paratrooper in the South Pacific during World War II and saw heavy combat — until he was shot in the left leg during the battle to liberate Manila from the Japanese. He referred to his wound as “the million-dollar bullet hole” because it got him out of combat and kept him off a plane that crashed, killing the last members of his badly depleted squadron.
Back home after the war, Norman landed the job with Detroit Edison. “He was thrilled to get that job and be taking pictures for a living,” Michael says. “Doing something creative in Detroit, a factory town — he was over the moon about it.”
The photos in this section of the exhibit have a noirish feel, night scenes that often carry an edge of menace. Here, for instance, is a picture of a pawn shop at night:
From Michael’s wall card: “I’ve had this photograph hanging in my writing room for the past twenty years and always thought it was a perfect example of the observer (the photographer) being observed. Yet I’ve just discovered something new in it… In my version, there is no sign in the upper right-hand corner that reads ‘Watches — Money to Loan.’ Which might explain the consternation of the black man looking out the doorway at the person taking the photograph. Someone taking pictures in or around an establishment that deals in personal relics, cash and usury is not always welcome.”
Michael speculates that the menace in such pictures may have been a byproduct of his father’s brutal experiences during the war. “I don’t know if these photos matched his state of mind at the time,” Michael says, “but I do think that’s a possibility. It had to be weird to come back from a year of heavy combat and realize, ‘Hey, I’m still alive!’”
Considerably less menacing is this picture of a man and two women eyeing the goods in a downtown Crowley’s department store window:
From the wall card: “I don’t exactly know what makes this such an interesting image to me. It may be the arresting combination of two women and one man, or the proscenium-like framing, but I suspect it’s the lighting. Three dark figures standing before a brightly lit shop window. Not quite silhouettes, they are both obscuring the light but also illuminated by it from the front. It definitely gives the image a kind of drama.”
PART TWO: Detroit as Muse
No photographic exhibit about Detroit at mid-century would be complete without pictures of cars. Here’s one of several in the show:
From the wall card: “I’m guessing that this one was taken in the parking lot of Detroit Edison in downtown Detroit. I think my father’s artistic eye did like the contrast between the chrome and sheet metal of the cars and the glass and brick of the surrounding buildings. To be sure, they make for an arresting juxtaposition here. By the way, that’s a 1956 Buick Special gleaming in the foreground, most likely my father’s new car. I have a feeling he was very proud of that car and wanted to work it into a photograph or two.”
The next image provides an unwitting snapshot of Detroit’s racial divide. The frame is dominated by a poster announcing a performance by the classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein at the Masonic Auditorium on Wednesday, March 14, 1956. But it’s the poster squeezed into the bottom of the frame that tells the story. It announces a “Jazz vs. Rock ‘n’ Roll” clash at the Graystone Ballroom the Monday before the Rubinstein concert. The Graystone show features an astonishing lineup: Dinah Washington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, T-Bone Walker and a dozen others. But there’s a subtext.
“In those pre-Motown years, Monday night was the only night black people were allowed inside the Graystone Ballroom,” Michael says. “It brings into focus how race relations were at that time: black people had their stuff and white people had their stuff. You see the racial dichotomy here. Then look at the people performing at the Graystone — all on the same bill! The Detroit music scene at that time was insane.”
And with the creation of Motown Records two years later, the Detroit music scene was about to get insanely popular. In 1963, Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. bought the Graystone Ballroom and turned it into a showcase for black performers who played to mixed audiences — any night of the week.
PART THREE: City of Work
“There are cities that get by on their good looks,” the Detroit crime writer Elmore Leonard once said, “and cities like Detroit that have to work for a living.”
Norman Zadoorian was one of those lucky Detroiters who happened to love the work he did for a living. He’d worked briefly in a Cadillac factory, a job he loathed, and after he got hired by Detroit Edison he frequently expressed amazement over his good fortune to his co-workers: “Can you believe we’re getting paid to take pictures?!”
In an eight-finger city like Detroit, it’s not surprising that Norman’s camera was frequently focused on people doing their jobs, which often involved risk, grime and monotony. “It’s a totally Detroit thing to do — telling the story of the city through its workers,” Michael says. Yet sometimes the monotony gave way to a certain grace and grandeur. Consider this picture of two men repairing an electric line:
From the wall card: “This one was definitely for Detroit Edison… The framing of this shot is so striking. The electric lines bisecting the sky, the men below cleaved and hanging backwards in the air, mere inches from deadly voltage. This is definitely dangerous work.”
Note also the neat row of newly built, single-family homes along the left edge of the frame, with their barbered lawns and struggling young trees. The street that runs up the middle of the frame is freshly poured concrete, as straight as a rifle shot — all of it adding up to a portrait of a growing, thriving, working-class city convinced its future could only be spectacularly bright.
Speaking of grandeur, here’s a picture of a young practitioner of a very Detroit occupation, auto mechanic:
From the wall card: “There’s a kind of heroism to these images, as a quality you don’t always attribute to auto mechanics. The man opening the garage door is a great example of this. The low angle makes him look larger than life, a mechanical superhero, ready to save the world from flat tires and engine knock. (And his shirt is so clean!)”
During the six months he spent selecting the photographs for the show and writing the wall cards, Michael learned some valuable things. “One of the big things I realized when I was doing this,” he says, “was the gift of having a father with a creative job. None of my friends’ fathers had glamorous jobs — a job with a car company was almost inevitable. Working for Detroit Edison may not have been exactly glamorous, but my father’s advice was to find something I love to do and figure out how to make a living doing it.”
Michael graduated from Detroit’s Redford High School in 1975, at the moment the city was electing its first black mayor and its population, after years of corporate and government abandonment and white flight, was tipping from majority white to majority black. “There was definitely racial tension at my school,” Michael says. “There were what we called mini-race riots, skirmishes on the school lawn. The old white teachers so did not give a shit. Many of them were just waiting to retire.”
Michael, a self-described “bully magnet” in those years, heeded his father’s advice and pursued his youthful passion for writing, earning a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in creative writing from Detroit’s Wayne State University. In 1991 he published his first short story, “Process,” a highly autobiographical tale about a son visiting his aging father, a photographer trying to sort out his voluminous life’s work — a job that would fall to Michael three decades after the story appeared. Since then Michael has published a short story collection and four acclaimed novels, including Beautiful Music, which makes beautiful use of his troubled, music-drenched high school years, and The Leisure Seeker, which was made into a movie starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren. Michael now hosts an eclectic weekly radio show called Retro Groove on Ferndale Radio, 100.7 FM.
Norman Zadoorian’s son found something he loves to do and figured out a way to make a living doing it. “When I first started writing,” Michael says, “my father was thrilled.” And Norman would surely be thrilled by the vivid portrait of mid-century Detroit, a collaboration between father and son, now hanging on the walls of the Library of Michigan.
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“The Searching Eye: Images of Mid-Century Detroit” will be at the Library of Michigan, at 702 W. Kalamazoo St., in Lansing, through Dec. 20.
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Bill Morris is the author of the new nonfiction book The Lions Finally Roar: The Ford Family, the Detroit Lions and the Road to Redemption in the N.F.L., as well as the novels Motor City Burning and Motor City. He grew up in Detroit and now lives in New York City.
