The POP-UP Portrait Studio continues a rich legacy of community storytelling in Southwest Detroit. This summer, eight young photographers joined the internship program at Inside Southwest Detroit, learning technical and creative photography skills while honoring the community's past and shaping its future.

Inspired by the work of our longtime partners Capturing Belief and La Sirena Studio, the POP-UP Portrait Studio continues the legacy of our collaborative efforts in youth-focused photography education. This includes initiatives like Young Detroit Photo Society, which also involved Darkroom Detroit. These programs and their creators recognized the power of photography for community building, cultural pride, and personal expression. The collective work has paved the way for today’s young photographers, who are now contributing their own perspectives to this ongoing narrative.

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The studio taps into a broader tradition of lens-based storytelling that spans cultures and generations, drawing inspiration from photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Malick Sibidé, Yousuf Karsh, Graciela Iturbide, Sebastião Salgado, and Martin Schoeller. These artists have transformed the potential of documentation and inspired generations by capturing and sharing the histories they've experienced.

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Assortment of images by Mary Ellen Mark, Malick Sidibé, Yousuf Karsh, Graciela Iturbide, Sebastião Salgado, and Martin Schoeller who have transformed the potential of documentation and inspired generations by capturing and sharing the histories they've experienced.

The youth apprentices are learning not just how to take photos, but how to see their community in a new light, tell its stories, and continue the legacy of those who came before them. By participating in the POP-UP Portrait Studio, they are building on a lineage of photographers who celebrate the beauty, strength, and diversity of their communities.

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POP-UP Portraits taken by the youth apprentices at The Alley Project during Aerosol Nightmares, a weekend mural festival centered in Southwest Detroit. July 14, 2024

The internship serves as an entry point into a community of practice that values storytelling, creativity, and collaboration. The studio synthesizes these inspirations, offering youth a chance to actively contribute to and shape the future of Southwest Detroit’s storytelling tradition. By engaging in this program, young photographers are ensuring that community-driven storytelling will continue to thrive for years to come.

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Opening night of The Archivists marked a powerful beginning to a month of shared learning and exchange. The exhibition opened to a strong and welcoming crowd, bringing together artists, organizers, students, neighbors, and partners from Detroit and Chicago. It was especially meaningful to see different networks intersect—university communities meeting neighborhood archivists, cross-city collaborators encountering one another’s work in person, and longtime practitioners sharing space with new audiences.

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The Archivists is a month-long exhibition on community archiving and collective memory, presented at the Scarab Club from January 4 through February 4, 2023. Organized by Inside Southwest Detroit, the exhibition brings together artists and community archive initiatives from Detroit and Chicago to explore how everyday people preserve, share, and steward their histories.

In the days leading up to the opening of The Archivists, the exhibition came together through a potluck style of collaboration with everyone bringing a pair of hands and a dish to pass. Artists, organizers, and partners gathered at the Scarab Club to spend time to put it all together while sharing stories and approaches to archiving as a collective practice.

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The Black Bottom Street View, a large-scale panoramic installation built from archival photographs dating back to the 1940s–1950s, emerged as we worked side by side assembling the piece. Hastings Street came into view in the middle of the main gallery, inviting visitors to walk through a neighborhood that lives on through memory, images, and storytelling thanks to the Black Bottom Archives.

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Near the garden doors we installed Nicole Marroquin’s work alongside fellow Chicagolandian Samantha Friend Cabrera’s exhibition, setting up a quiet dialogue between their practices. Together with Scarab Club staff, we arranged and hung The Southwest Detroiter Community Archives story by Elizabeth Valdez facilitated through Shoeboxing, grounding the exhibition in lived memory.

Upstairs Karen Cardenas prepared the room to feel like a familiar home rooted in the land and culture of her film No Te He Visto. A communal table and looping screen were positioned so visitors can sit together and experience the film as part of daily life.

The Joy Project transformed the corner of the main gallery into an education on land as archive with soil, seeds, and cultivation carrying history. They extended their presence upstairs in conversation with the shoeboxing stories and film.

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By the end of installation, throughout the space, walls and corners were filled with quotes and texts in the words of each project’s founders and practitioners. Before the doors even opened, The Archivists already felt alive, shaped as much by collaboration as by the work itself.

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The Archivists is a month-long exhibition on community archiving and collective memory, presented at the Scarab Club from January 4 through February 4, 2023. Organized by Inside Southwest Detroit, the exhibition brings together artists and community archive initiatives from Detroit and Chicago to explore how everyday people preserve, share, and steward their histories.