Travel

Memorial to the masterminds of the Armenian genocide
Enver Pasha is one of three Ottoman Turkish leaders (the Young Turks) who organized the genocide against Armenains, beginning in 1915.
Midhat Pasha was another Ottoman Empire reformer, killed while in prison, in 1883.
Mahmud Shevket Pasha was an Ottoman reformer assassinated in 1913 in Istanbul.

Fourteen years ago I traveled in Turkey and worked on a documentary project photographing the legacy of Armenia’s culture in modern-day Turkey and historic locations associated with Armenians’ long history in Anatolia. I also photographed locations linked to the genocide of Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire, between 1915 and 1922. About 1.5 million civilians were slaughtered in the first documented case of genocide in the 20th century. This fact is still disputed today by the Republic of Turkey, and I outright discount that argument because of the overwhelming evidence, from documents, first-person accounts, and mountains of evidence.

The Talaat Pasha Memorial in Instanbul proved to be the hardest place for me to find and photograph. There was no guidebook showing me the way, and no map called it out. Even its name was in dispute. I called it the Talaat Pasha memorial, and that is what some Turks I met called it when I finally tracked it down in the Caglayan neighborhood of Istanbul. It was gated, not well-marked, and overgrown with weeds. It was not the safest place to go, and photographing the monuments in the square likely would have caused me problems. So, I made a fast job of it, snapped some photos, and left quickly.

Currently web sites are now publishing pictures of the site, more than a decade later.  Here are photos by a Turkish photographer from 2011. Web sites I found, including the Wikipedia entry (whose facts may not be fully accurate), also show contemporary photos of the location. I have found the plaza square to be dubbed the Monument of Liberty Cemetery and Hürriyet Şehitleri Abidesi, or “Freedom Martyrs Monument.” There is apparent agreement of online sources that the site was originally built before World War I to honor reformers, who died or were killed.

It is perhaps famous or infamous today becuase it has the graves of the remains of two of the three leaders of the Ottoman Empire, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, who organized the genocide against civilian Armenians. (You can read my detailed story here about the genocide and my trip to Turkey; note the file is large, so please allow time for it to download.)

Current photographs of those memorials honoring these leaders is even published by the official Government of Turkey web site. That site clearly shows the memorials of these two leaders and notes, almost ironically, the massive Palace of Justice of Istanbul that has been built behind the memorial plaza: “Hailed as the biggest courthouse in Europe by the government, it overlooks the park and the Monument. It almost seems like the justice system is entrusted to the watch of the Committee whose members used to pledge alliance to it with a rifle and Quran. Whether this has any connection with justice let alone liberty is of course another question.”

Symbolism and language matter, as do monuments. Enver Pasha’s remains were returned here in 1996, and Talaat Pasha’s remains in 1943, during World War II. When Enver Pasha’s remains were feted in a ceremony in 1998, one news account noted that thousands attended, including President Suleyman Demirel, ministers, deputies, and Turkey’s top generals, and the former war minister. Enver Pasha was proclaimed a martyr. “Enver Pasha, with his faults and merits, is an important symbol of our recent history,” Demirel said. “We have no doubt that history will reach the proper judgments through evaluating past events.”

The photo evidence published online today and the Government of Turkey’s web site that shows a spruced up memorial  clearly signal that the current government of Turkey shows no interest in backing away from its denial that the last leaders of the former Ottoman Empire were masterminds of a massive human rights violation, which still causes controversy today.

(Click on each photograph to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

The Resurrection River, Alaska
Taken near the Resurrection River Cabin.

One of my favorite day trips from Anchorage was traveling to Hope, Alaska, and then heading up the Resurrection Trail on the Kenai Peninsula. Lots of bears in here, but almost no salmon. I think the salmon runs had been decimated by placer mining on the Resurrection River, and fish and game officials were trying to restore the runs as I was leaving the state in 2010. Ran and biked many times along this beauty, including a 50 mile ultra. Always great in June.

Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, Warsaw
In Warsaw, a sculpture honors prisoners killed and imprisoned in World War II by the invading Soviet Army, a still controversial issue to this day.

In Warsaw, ghosts of World War II are all around. In July 2000, I found this one, Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East. It honors victims of Soviet atrocities to Polish prisoners who died in captivity in camps in the former U.S. S.R. during that insane war that only ended 70 years ago today. Seems like an appropriate day to honor the memory of ghosts. (Click on the photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.)

Detroit, my home town

This is the final post I am making, for a while at least, on the city of my birth, Detroit. I wanted to capture the industrial area located in Dearborn and southwest Detroit, around the River Rouge and Zug Island. The neighborhood filmed is called Delray. The murals shown in the video are by Diego Rivera, at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. They capture the world-famous Mexican muralist’s impressions of industrial production and Ford’s River Rouge complex, then the world’s largest factory, in the early 1930s.

And then there were the ruins … 1989 and today
This is a copy of a photograph I took in 1989, when this still looked like a healthy neighborhood.
This picture is taken from a Google Maps street view, for the purposes of editorial comment.

My recent visit to Detroit still lingers in my mind, particularly in light of some recent comments I have heard back in Portland. One person said, oh, I heard there are some innovative community gardens there. Such comments, which mean well, reveal a distressingly strong disconnect from the painful reality that still faces hundreds of thousands of residents that is beyond Detroit’s ability alone to fix. Even Mark Binelli, author of the 2012 portrayal of his ancestral home, Detroit City Is the Place to Be, does not hold punches when trying to frame the efforts to revive the city in positive light. “And then there were the ruins,” writes Binnelli of the 90,000 abandoned structures as of 2012. “When it comes to the sheer level of decay, Detroit is a singular place … .”

So it was inevitable I had to look up where my relatives once lived. What I found took the air out of my lungs. This is a home of relatives from my biological family (I am adopted) as it appeared in in 1989, when I took the picture. The home is a tract house on the city’s westside, not far from River Rouge Park. It was an OK looking neighborhood when I stopped to take the photo. I did not, perhaps thankfully, visit it during my trip. I did find the Google Maps street view, which I provide for comparison. The Wayne County Tax Assessor’s office now lists the owner as the Detroit Land Bank Authority, meaning the emptied and gutted structure is in receivership waiting to be sold at auction with thousands of other distressed properties. The value is pegged under $50,000 according to numerous real-estate web site, but I doubt anyone will live here again. It looks dead.

This is hardly anything new for residents. This was a street where working-class couples could buy into the middle-class dream, which is what my relatives did. This was before the ending of redlining that segregated African-Americans from these areas, before integration, and before upheavals of the 1960s. Then they left, as the city began its downward slide, for reasons I still do not know. Racial issues, global trade, outsourced industrial jobs, NAFTA, white flight, and more all had a part to play on this street, not to mention a host of other federal policies that transformed cities like Detroit.

What is troubling for me is to know that a public park and now-closed school are across the street. Lives were lived in this neighborhood. Lives are still lived here. And this home is now a corpse, among many in this once great city. Now when I look at abandoned homes I think of the lives of those who had all their dreams wrapped into them. This just happens to be part of my own family story. I simply want to cry.

UM Law School Quad, the center of power
Cook Williams Library

Architecture serves many purposes. It provides beauty with function. It enlightens and inspires. It expresses our ambitions, desires, and emotions. During my recent visit to Ann Arbor, I toured the University of Michigan Law School Quadrangle, better known as the Quad. I loved the English Gothic style and how the architects purposefully created a space to demonstrate power and purpose. Prestigious? Yes. Expensive? You betcha. And the competition is fierce to get in.

According to the Society of Architectural Historians, “The school recalls the design of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and of the Inns of Court in London, but it is adapted to modern academic life.”

Thousands of them a year, bro

Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit, An American Autopsy, has provided one of the most painful descriptions of nihilistic self-destruction I have ever read. It is a brutally honest dissection of Detroit. While working as a reporter for the Detroit News, he became close to a company of the city’s beleaguered firefighters, who have battled literally thousands of fires intentionally set by criminal arsonists throughout the metro area. LeDuff shared this comment from one of the firefighters who is asked to do the near impossible–save a city the residents are intentionally burning down.

“In this town, arson is off the hook. Thousands of them a year, bro,” the firefighter told LeDuff. “In Detroit, it’s so fucking poor that a fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is three-fifty, and a movie is eight bucks, and there aren’t any movie theaters left in Detroit so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a forty, and they’re barbecuing and laughing ‘cause it’s fucking entertainment. It’s unbelievable. And the old lady living next door, she don’t have no insurance, and her house goes up in flames and she’s homeless and another fucking block dies.”

In my entire life, during which I have visited dozens of countries, I have not witnessed anything as bizarre as this. I have seen worse than this, and things vastly more evil than this. But the utter pointlessness of this chaos, besides pure anger and loss of meaning, seem overwhelming. And people live with this, next to his, surrounded by this, engulfed by this. For those of you out there who may snicker and even enjoy this, take heed. LeDuff and many other chroniclers of the downfall of the American middle-class in cities like Detroit have a message for you. Detroit is not the past. Detroit is the future, coming to a place near you, and quicker than you think.

Most of these crime scenes are in what used to be called the Delray neighborhood, near Dearborn and Jefferson, by Zug Island. Hard to imagine that people still make the best of it here. It is home to someone. I often wonder what Canadians just across the Detroit River may have thought seeing flames, if they could see the smoke amid the heavy industry that surrounds this former Hungarian-American enclave. This is now called a “ghost town” within a city.

God has left Detroit
Billionaire Matty Manoun owns this once grand statement to beaux arts civic architecture, the abandoned railway station in Detroit that is now famous for ruin porn photographers from around the globe.
A Bike Lane now graces a stretch of Michigan Avenue near downtown Detroit.
Abandoned buildings on Jefferson Avenue in River Rouge neighborhood.

In April, I spent a couple of eye-opening days in my home town, Detroit. I was born here. My grandparents lived here for decades. My biological family (I am adopted) grew up here on my birth mother’s side. I only lived here a year, before my adoptive parents left in 1966, a year before the deadly race riots of 1967, one of several that have spanned more than 120 years.

Photographers who parachute into Detroit, like me, are rightfully accused of being disaster voyeurs. Photographing Detroit is now its own photo genre many dub “ruin porn.” Taking pictures of a dying place, where real people are struggling just to survive, is by definition schadenfreude.

I guess I have a saving grace. I am a native son. I really was born in a hospital here. My family, on my birth mother’s side, has true Detroit roots, and for that reason I feel a strong attachment.

I wrote a short essay about my trip in April, and I find myself feeling deeply unsettled now about how the last eight years of our Great Recession have been handled and the wars that preceded it. Going to Detroit you cannot ignore the massive impact of trade policies like NAFTA and the globalization of manufacturing in the years before and after its signing, when the United States began to export its manufacturing jobs overseas.

Jeez, here we are the wealthiest country on earth, and yet we let our great industrial center literally collapse before us, all while venturing overseas to preserve our strategic interests. We all watched and let the patient wither in agony, at times laughing at the patient’s demise. Today the lethal court clown of a city titillates us with reality TV that delights in the destruction of Detroit and the goofy exploits of its charismatic preachers, reality star cops, and wacky urban survivalists.

I love road trips, particularly in Oregon

Road trips always have their own flavor. I love unexpected discoveries and having an open mind to welcome the new, the different, and the unplanned. This trip took me from Portland, to Sisters (biking up to McKenzie Pass), to Fort Rock, to Eugene, and back home. I learned about the oldest shoes ever found in the world, at Fort Rock. I also fell in love with the beauty of Eugene. I lived there for nearly two years in the mid-’90s and still thinks it’s a lovely place. Hope you all take a road trip soon, everyone. (Click on each photo to see a larger photo on a separate picture page.)

Fort Rock State Natural Area up close and from afar

 

This is the second in my series of images published on the Fort Rock State Natural Area. My first set of photos were taken  near the entrance to the old volcanic caldera. A reply I received from a person who is an advocate for the Fort Rock Valley Historical Society wanted to be sure I noted that the Fort Rock Homestead Village is a citizen led effort and uses donated buildings, all of which are authentic to the area. Duly noted. A museum is open to the visiting public, and it is worth a story stop too. My only regret is not having done enough research in advance and learned more about the amazing footwear found near the crater–the world’s oldest known pair of shoes, or should I say sandals. Here are a few more angles of the area, as well as the village.

Click on each photo to see a larger picture on a separate picture page.