I think memory is something that comes into my work a lot.
I think through the landscape here you can actually see the past in a lot of ways.
This poem is from a longer series.
How many things do you want to return to?
Cities, apartments, loves.
For a long time I wanted every place I had lived to disappear.
Too many memories refolded into someone else's like paper.
We saw a whole building pulled skyward one night, waves of phosphorescence pulsing.
Flames are just versions of falling water sucked backwards, versions of light.
I had never seen a house on fire.
The kids who did it, hadn't either, but they wanted to.
I grew up on the west side of the state in Grand Rapids.
I lived in an arbor.
So coming here and starting to work in the schools, I found myself hugely in the racial minority,
hugely in the socioeconomic minority, and found myself confronted with a visual landscape that was really jarring to me.
Lots of emptiness, lots of quiet, lots of nature sort of taking over wrecked urban landscapes.
All this stuff is sort of sad in a way, but I also found that it was really beautiful to me
and meaningful to me in a way that I wanted to sort of sit with and think about.
And I found that to be really inspiring in terms of my work.
I mean, dance is important, art is important.
Detroit proved to have birthed a lot of great things out of this city and dance is one of them.
We're not just a motor city and produce cars, but look at other aspects of Detroit.
The jit, strictly a Detroit style dance, is very important to Detroit.
Everybody in Detroit know what it is, but a lot of people outside don't know what it is.
So it's kind of like this hidden jewel.
That's why I'm putting out this documentary showing the importance of the early beginnings of this dance form.
Because a lot of people think that the jit is dead and it's not dead.
When I dance, I try to be witty with it.
It's like you're talking in language, but not only are you speaking it, you're speaking poetry.
So you're being real creative with it.
So each step is a word, shuffles our phrases, you know what I'm saying?
You put those together.
When I got into middle school, I was like a natural dancer.
I just wanted to dance like a lot of the parties, whatever.
They were jitting at the time.
And then my brother, I would say he's a big influence.
He took me to the first hip-hop club, St. Andrews.
I got a chance to see some people actually breaking.
I seen that went home and said, this is what I'm going to do.
Dancing allowed me to do things that people would only imagine.
You would think it's just dance, but I'm telling you, it opens up a lot.
I work with reality.
That's what my photos are.
They're documents of my manifestations of reality.
Every year that I'm here, a new layer of reality reveals itself.
You know, you might take a picture of the outside of something,
and then you might actually go inside,
and then you might find that there's a person inside,
and actually a really beautiful story inside of the head of that person.
And the real photos for me, they are born out of complete immersion
into the environment or whatever it is that you're looking at.
I moved from Amsterdam.
I felt that there was something here to explore and to really immerse in,
and I felt like the only way to do that was to move downtown and to see what it's like.
I think Detroit is a very real place.
It can be kind of an emotional roller coaster, you know,
where hell is kind of just around the corner,
but around the other corner, there's something completely different happening.
Then I keep learning, you know, you can't judge a book on its cover.
You don't take things at phase value,
and so once you get past the spectacle, really, that is Detroit,
and oh, it's collapsed buildings and kind of apocalypse
that have been very well documented.
Once you see beyond that and see between the cracks,
there's a lot of interesting stuff going on
that I think is very worth documenting.
I feel like it's a never-ending story, unwinding, you know, in front of you,
and all I have to do is remember to take the photo,
which might be the hardest part sometimes.
