CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/18/2013

Photographer Enrico Natali Launches 'Detroit 1968' at MoCAD

MOCAD, ARTBOOK | D.A.P. and FOGGY NOTION BOOKS present a book release talk and reception with photographer Enrico Natali, in celebration of his new book, Detroit 1968.

Friday, November 22, 7-9pm
Admission: Free
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
4454 Woodward Ave

Enrico Natali’s Detroit 1968, published by Foggy Notion Books, is an extraordinary body of photographic work that was originally published in 1972 (under the title New American People). Throughout this pivotal moment, Enrico Natali empathically documented Detroit, its people and their environments, and their lives and conditions in his compelling photographs.

Forty-one years later, Natali’s photographs of Detroit still resonate with hope and emotion, and indeed have taken on an added pathos. These pictures capture the relative calm before the storm: people attending art exhibitions, sporting events, a high school prom; families posing together for portraits; secretaries smoking their afternoon cigarettes; children, parents and grandparents, workers of every stripe—machinists, waitresses, beauticians—plying their trades with what might be described in retrospect as innocence. The spirits of these nameless faces, young and old, are the ghosts that haunt what is now—very literally—this bankrupt metropolis.

Handsome, timely and poignant, Detroit 1968 includes an essay by Mark Binelli, author of the critically acclaimed Detroit City Is the Place to Be (2012, Metropolitan Books).

Join Mr. Natali at MOCAD for a Q&A (led by Vince Carducci of the College for Creative Studies) and reception celebrating the release of this book. Free and open to the public. MOCAD will have copies of the book for sale, too.

ENRICO NATALI was born in 1933, in Utica, New York. During the 1960s he lived and photographed in various American cities, including New Orleans, Chicago, and Detroit. At the end of that decade he ceased work as a photographer and began a meditation practice that became his primary focus, as he built a home and raised his family in California's Los Padres National Forest. In 1990 Natali and his wife, Nadia, founded the Blue Heron Center for Integral Studies, a Zen meditation center in Ojai, California.

VINCE CARDUCCI is a cultural critic, social researcher, and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. A former Detroit corespondent for Artforum, Carducci has written essays and reviews for various publications including Art in America, The Journal of Consumer Culture, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. He has also been a contributing writer for Metro Times, Detroit's leading weekly newspaper, and a staff writer for PopMatters, a webzine of global culture. He taught at Oakland University and Wayne State University, and coordinated the Critical Studies/Humanities program at Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2010, he received the Kresge Foundation’s Arts in Detroit Literary Fellowship for his art criticism.