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Blaise Tobia
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Pillars of the Community
1982-83
Driving around Detroit one of the things that caught my attention was a plethora of buildings that had been constructed as banks but now were serving different purposes. Ar first I thought that they had closed as banks in the financial crisis of the 1970s but it turns out that they had all closed during the Great Depression. The buildings had survived undemolished for fifty years because Detroit had never recovered economically and there was no incentive to replace them. Instead, they were acquired to become storefront churches, bars, corner stores, even a porn theater. I photographed nearly one-hundred of them with a view camera and color transparency film, usually early on weekend mornings.
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