The modern documentary line: ruins, a river path, and a neighborhood's portraits

c. 2003–2016 — Turok, Westhues, Dickey, and the Photoformers

The city as subject now: The present era's documentary record of South Bend was made by photographers who came to the city's remains and its neighborhoods as their subject. Antonio Turok, the Mexican photographer born in 1955 whose work is held internationally, photographed the "Old Studebaker Factory, South Bend, Indiana" in 2009; the digital pigment print is held by the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at Notre Dame, the gift of the artist — the ruin of the wagon works entered in a major photographer's American survey. Kay Westhues, an Indiana photographer, made "The Portage Path" for the city itself: a portfolio commissioned by the Snite Museum of Art for South Bend's 150th anniversary in 2015, exhibited at the museum and published in YIELD Magazine's Issue 02 of April 2016, and issued as a handprinted artist's book in an edition of twelve — the old portage ground between the St. Joseph and Kankakee rivers, walked and photographed for the sesquicentennial. From inside the city, Jacquee Dickey's Northeast Neighborhood portrait project — twenty-three residents, made about 2003 — was archived at the Northern Indiana Center for History, the History Museum's predecessor; and the Robinson Photoformers, an after-school club at the Robinson Community Learning Center, exhibited its own chronicle of its neighborhood on 25 January 2013. The fine-art photographers stand in the Artists file; the line here is the working documentary one, and its shape has inverted the studio era's: the city's people are now pictured less by resident tradesmen than by commissioned artists, visiting masters, and the neighborhoods themselves.

Sources:

1. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame — Antonio Turok, "Old Studebaker Factory, South Bend, Indiana" (2009), digital pigment print, gift of the artist.
2. Snite Museum of Art (now Raclin Murphy Museum of Art) and YIELD Magazine, Issue 02 (April 2016) — Kay Westhues, "The Portage Path," commissioned for South Bend's 150th anniversary (2015); the handprinted artist's book, edition of twelve.
3. Northern Indiana Center for History (now The History Museum) — Jacquee Dickey's Northeast Neighborhood portrait project (twenty-three residents, c. 2003), archived; Notre Dame News (25 January 2013) — the Robinson Photoformers exhibition.
4. Cross-reference: Artists — the fine-art line and the museum's photograph collections (including the Scholz Collection of nineteenth-century photographs).