Eric Smith

(b. 1947, resides in Huntington Woods, MI)

Michigan Central Train Station #1, 2008

Michigan Central Train Station #19, 2008

In a series of portfolios Eric Smith photographs architecture in Detroit, using it to illustrate the city’s ongoing transformation. In his contribution to the Midwest Photographers Project Smith focuses on the abandoned Michigan Central Station, a train depot in the Beaux Arts style that was built in 1913 and closed in 1988. Although it shows years of neglect, the building’s marble walls and Doric columns are solidly intact and the space retains its majestic scale. Smith uses digital techniques—a process called High Dynamic Range Imaging and tone-mapping—to depict the setting with a sensuous, intensified luminosity. These methods, Smith states, “dramatically transform this tragic and forgotten building into a ‘hyper real’ reminder of its past glory,” giving the station a palatial, if still somewhat melancholy air.

As a result of this HDR process Smith’s photographs bear a resemblance to meticulously painted illustrations and on a cursory view they can easily be taken for inventive depictions of a mythical setting. Nevertheless, they are records of a real place, with a history that echoes Detroit’s own economic decline. This aspect comes to light in Smith’s photographs of the vandalism that runs across every accessible surface in the train terminal. People have found their way inside the shuttered building and left their mark. To a degree the colorful graffiti seems in harmony with the opulent, almost iridescent interior as Smith portrays it—the spray-painted tags could be mysterious glyphs or ornamental flourishes. Yet even as Smith enhances the monumentality of the space and aestheticizes the graffiti, a note of tension emerges between the recovered sense of the station as a symbol of prosperity and signs of a bleaker reality.

Eric Smith studied Fine Arts Photography at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He has exhibited his photographs since 1972 and has been a working photographer since 1980.