Foggy Notion Books is bringing out a book of photographs from Detroit that was first published in 1972 under the title "New American People."
The new book, titled "Detroit 1968," is just that: Photos of the city by Enrico Natali, a Calfornia-based photographer who spent three years in Detroit in the late 1960s.
Laura Berman, the Detroit News columnist, writes about the photos on the Time LightBox website:
Today, Detroit is an exotic and extreme place whose grassy fields and acres upon acres of concrete ruins evoke horror and shame even from those who live here. On the surface, what Natali caught in these photographs is normality, a Detroit that’s neither urban outlier nor crucible of failure. If, when viewing his pictures, one can forget the city’s fate, Natali captured a kind of generic — perhaps an idealized — urban America, a place where even in a year of assassinations, racial violence and an Apollo launch, more than a million people lived, died, toiled, loved, fought and, individually and collectively, caught their breath.
Looking at the photographs in 2013, it’s impossible not to see a city clearly on the cusp. The faces are optimistic – and just a little bit wary. The people of Natali’s Detroit are young, mostly white, and – in those pre-high fructose syrup days — noticeably thinner than their modern counterparts. From the ossified society matrons in their ball gowns, to the young career women in their bouffant hairdos and nylon stockings, there’s a sense of unease in each frame, a feeling you can’t quite name.
Foggy Notion Books carries this description of the book:
"Detroit 1968" by Enrico Natali is an extraordinary body of photographic work that was originally published in 1972 (under the title New American People). As the fall of Detroit began, as her middle class American Dreamers began moving to greener pastures, and while the Motor City’s status as one of the shining stars of the industrial revolution began to fade, Detroit became a locus for the racial conflict and political upheaval that swept the country during the late 1960s. Throughout this pivotal moment, Enrico Natali was present, emphatically documenting Detroit, her people and their environments, and their lives and conditions in his compelling photographs.
Forty-one years later (sic), 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.
