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143 4 The Michigan Central Train Station If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beaten solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road In Urban Encounters, Helen Liggett writes, “If photography is seen as the art of making (not taking) pictures, the possibility emerges for using it as a productive part of city life. From this perspective, photographic images bring memory and experience together, attracting meanings in the process of stopping time and presenting a space” (120). Liggett’s exploration of the urban space’s relationship to imagery captures the city as the everyday, as encounters, as spaces made by those who engage with them, who encounter them, and who respond to them. Liggett situates photography as a way to “arrest” or stop space so that one might fabricate relationships (personal or otherwise) with the given space that otherwise would never come into being. In the previous chapter, I outlined such a feature of the network by developing an affective interface whose functionality stems from encounter and response (the spaces within the Maccabees I encountered and work from). Technology, like the camera Liggett emphasizes, assists in the process of making space because of the various ways its interfaces allow for experience to mesh with institutional bodies such as a building. The camera, for Liggett, stops space so that we (as photographer or viewer) may encounter the space’s various components and consequently enter into a rhetorical relationship with the space. In Liggett’s work, photography serves as a tool and interface for encountering space as framed by the city and the everyday. In the moment of encounter, space is captured as reproduced image but also represented as something else, something that a photograph may not convey: an emotion , a feeling, an aspiration, a disappointment, a relay for a newly formed The Michigan Central Train Station 144 relationship. Encounter, Liggett claims, includes representational and nonrepresentational features of space. The encounter may reenforce or shift understandings of space. Her thesis echoes the project set up by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift in Cities: Reimagining the Urban that “encounter, and the reaction to it, is a formative element in the urban world” (30). Amin and Thrift, like Liggett, work to overcome specific types of spatial representations and the power structures associated with them. “Rather than focusing on the conventional interest in urban studies on the domination and oppression by certain kinds of actors and institutions,” Amin and Thrift write, “our concern is with power as a mobile, circulating force which through the constant re-citation of practices, produces self-similar outcomes, moment by moment” (105). The conventional urban image of power, as the previous chapters demonstrate, prevents understandings of spaces, like Detroit, as being anything but victims in larger institutional power struggles. The affective interface, as the Maccabees shows me, does not eliminate power or its image, but instead functions by secrecy, a more ambiguous and affective means for establishing power relationships . Secrecy involves the multisensory layering of moments without the quest to uncover this layering as the symptom of a greater struggle (as an investigation of power would require). The notion of secrecy within the network always leaves some elements of a given relationship unsettled and uncertain so that the curious may establish new connections within the interface. A building interface keeps building. Amin and Thrift argue for a type of building interface (without naming it as such) by locating recitations, or rhetorical productions, as contributors to power relations in the city. Photography is one way to recite, or repeat, an image of a space. It is affective, I note following Liggett’s work, for what it hides (its power to represent) or keeps secret. “The camera becomes an active tool, not of representation, but of presentation” (Liggett 120). The photograph, like the object it represents, evokes the presentation of sensations. It remakes a given space as the juxtaposition of place, personal experience, affect, and other related moments. “Objects are a vital part of passions” (Amin and Thrift 87). Photographs, themselves objects, are as well. One of my earliest encounters with Detroit and my ensuing passion— and one shared by many other visitors to the Motor City—was with the Michigan Central Train Station (MCS), a mammoth depot located off of Michigan Avenue and adjacent to the city’s Corktown neighborhood. Designed by the same firm that designed New York’s Grand Central Station , the MCS opened December 26, 1913. There is nothing...

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