Featured Educator: Carlos Diaz
By Aimee Baldridge / Published by MOC



The Detroit educator talks about how he got his start in the darkroom at General Motors, the ways his department and his approach to preparing students for the life of a working photographer have evolved over 28 years of change, and how his own photographic work gets personal about the headlines of the day.

View selections from Carlos Diaz's Beyond Borders: Latino Immigrants and Southwest Detroit in the slideshow above. You can also see more of his work on the Catherine Edelman Gallery website.

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Carlos Diaz can’t sit in a neighborhood cafe for long before people start dropping by to chat and ask about his latest projects. At Cafe Con Leche, a corner coffee shop on Detroit’s Southwest Side, the photographer and College for Creative Studies (CCS) professor caught up with other patrons before settling down to talk about his lengthy career. He recently completed a portrait project with Latino immigrants who live in the area surrounding the cafe, and his affable, low-key way of talking with old and new acquaintances provided some insight into how he made connections with a community that can be wary of getting too much public attention.

Connecting with people on a personal level has been an important element of his work over the course of his 28-year career. Working in a city that has often made headlines as an emblem of broad social and economic changes, Diaz has sought to explore the individual lives that have shaped and been shaped by them. It’s an approach he has passed along to his students during his years at CCS, teaching them to make photographs that connect them with the ever-changing world around them.

Diaz’s own education in photography began at the relatively late age of 26, after he realized that the career path he’d started out on as a draftsman and mechanical designer for General Motors wasn’t taking him in the direction he wanted to go. “I really became frustrated with sitting at a desk and drawing, doing the same thing over and over,” Diaz recalls. “I went to the doctor and the doctor said, ‘You know, you're getting ulcers. Do you drink?’ And I said, ‘No, nothing at all.’ He said, ‘Do you like your job?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’”

While working at GM, he started taking on darkroom duties. Because he had learned how to process film and make prints in community college night courses, he was asked to handle those tasks for the staff photographers while they were busy shooting. The company turned out to be giving him a bit of unintentional career guidance. “After I had that experience,” he says, “it really convinced me that doing photography was what I wanted to do.”

When GM laid him off between projects in 1978, Diaz decided to go to school full-time at CCS and earned his BFA there. “At that point,” he recalls, “I fell in love with taking pictures and looking at pictures and collecting photography books and all that stuff. I just jumped in head to toe.” After continuing on to earn an MFA in 1984 from the University of Michigan and begin working as an instructor there and then at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Diaz was offered a part-time teaching job back at his alma mater in Detroit. That job soon turned into a full-time position, and 28 years later, Diaz is still feeling much better.

Around the time when Diaz joined CCS as an instructor, things began to change in the industry—the auto industry, that is. As with most Detroit institutions, the College’s fortunes have long been linked to those of the Big Three auto makers. “Because we're located where we are, we have customarily supplied photographers to the automotive industry,” Diaz explains. “All of the great car photographers from the last few generations have been CCS alumni.” It was a tradition that couldn’t last. “I think things really started to change here in Detroit when the automotive industry started to die out,” Diaz says. “At that point in time, we no longer had the luxury of preparing students specifically for a particular market. They had to now be ready to move into any available vacancy that they were afforded. So it was a big shift. When the automotive industry started to go down, we really had to broaden the skills of our students.”

Diaz responded to the shift as chairman of the photography department between 1994 and 2000. He merged the commercial studio and fine art programs that had previously been offered as separate tracks, with some students following the commercial track and going into a career related to the auto industry, and the others pursuing a fine art career. The combined approach now gives each student a less specialized and more flexible set of skills. “We eliminated some of the electives, but require now that students take all of the studio classes and all of the fine art classes,” says Diaz. “I think because they're so well rounded, it does prepare them to go out into the real world and confront anything that becomes an option for them.”

Today, CCS guides about 130 undergraduates toward a BFA in photography. The school’s main campus, where the photography department is housed, is located in Detroit’s Cultural Center area, a cluster of museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions in the heart of the city. The photography department offers both digital and chemical facilities, and the program requires students to spend a copious amount of time in both, an approach that Diaz considers essential to teaching the fundamentals of photography.

“Unlike a lot of other schools that made the mistake of gutting their darkrooms, we really never did that,” Diaz explains. “I think that the reason why we continue to use the wet darkroom as the first step in teaching photography is because it is a slower, tactile, more methodical process.” Students learn both chemical and digital techniques in the first-semester class that Diaz has been giving to new students for 28 years. When students accustomed to the speed and power of digital imaging tools begin, he says, “they really don't know whether one move is any better than the next move because they don't take the time to contemplate or to compare those stages or those steps.” Doing that in the darkroom teaches them the fundamentals of working with light and materials, and then by completing assignments that integrate digital techniques and technology into the process, students learn how the fundamentals apply in digital photography.

Diaz also teaches the history of photography in his foundation course, along with topics that elucidate its connection to politics, social issues, and the sciences. Equipping students with technical skills isn’t his only goal. “I’ve always felt the best photographers are thinking photographers,” he says. “They're not just technicians, but they're also thinkers.” One of the changes he has noticed in new students over the years is a difference in the way they relate to the world around them. “I think that young people are very passive when it comes to the world that they live in and how they function within that world,” he explains. “Young people are much more willing to accept the things that they see, the things that they hear. And I think that one of the jobs of an arts educator is to get the students to begin to question the things around them, to not accept them, but to challenge them.” To that end, he designs assignments that push students to examine their surroundings in new ways and think about “how some photographs simply render or represent the surface of subjects and other photographs talk about issues that lie beneath the surface.”

Exposing what lies beneath the surface has been an important element of Diaz’s own photographic work as well. It’s a kind of exploration that first came to fruition in one of his early major projects, an installation piece called “The Unemployed Auto Worker.” Diaz began working on the project after speaking with his own brother about losing his job in the auto industry after nearly 30 years. “I sensed how bothered my brother was at having lost his job and it just moved me so much,” he recalls. “And in the news you were hearing about this plant closing, that plant closing.” Diaz shot a series of portraits of unemployed auto workers and hung them in a gallery where he’d covered the walls with newspapers carrying stories about auto industry job losses. In the center of the room, he constructed a space that looked like a typical working class living room. Visitors could watch a collection of interviews with his portrait subjects on the TV there—while sitting on the couch next to a real live unemployed auto worker who could talk to them about how all the changes that were making the news had affected him personally. Says Diaz, “I wanted the viewer to think about the new circumstances an unemployed person found themselves in.”

In his most recent project, Diaz employed a similar kind of social zoom lens to explore a topic that has been making headlines in recent years: immigration. With support from a Kresge Foundation grant and a Mamiya camera loan from MAC-On-Campus, Diaz created a collection of images that he has titled “Beyond Borders: Latino Immigrants and Southwest Detroit.” It presents two distinct views of his subject. Diaz took photos of homes in the predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood that lies near the border with Canada on Detroit’s Southwest side. Exploring the area on foot, he shot the views that any passerby might see from the street when glancing casually into people’s yards. And then he came in close for a much more personal perspective, using the Mamiya medium format camera to capture highly detailed closeup portraits of Mexican immigrants who live in the neighborhood.

The intimate approach he took with the portraits isn’t just intended to give viewers a closer look at the subjects, but to give them a bit of the experience of being in the same room with them, just the way his unemployed autoworker sitting on the couch made visitors encounter the subject in a personal way. “I want the pictures to confront the viewer,” says Diaz. “I want the power to be with the sitter and not with the viewer.” Viewers in Detroit will have the opportunity to be in the same room with the portraits in the fall of 2011, when the Detroit Institute of Arts will show the images it has acquired from the collection.

Diaz is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, and most of the fine art work he sells through the gallery makes a departure from his more socially engaged projects, including collage pieces and platinum prints of scenes from his travels abroad. It’s work that reflects the attachment to craft that first led Diaz to become a draftsman and to fall in love with the darkroom. “I love working with my hands,” he says. Not that the work is entirely removed from the social concerns of this Motor City observer; many of his collages are composed of elements from turn-of-the-century engravings of New York’s Coney Island amusement park. As Diaz points out, it was created to be a playground for the working class that arose when farmers became factory workers as a result of the American Industrial Revolution. Diaz explains: “It was the first time for many of these people that they had time off.”

Although he’s usually balancing more than one photography project with his responsibilities as an educator, Diaz does manage to find a little time off himself. In it, he raises Bonsai trees. “They go through a cycle of transition,” he reflects. “The reason why I love living in the Midwest is because of the distinctive four seasons; I love the change. I always have so many things going on because I need change. I don't get bored. It keeps me young.”

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Featured photographer: Carlos Diaz


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