Photography
By Cary Loren
Photography was a special interest for Bahnmiller, who first picked up a camera during her student days at the University of Michigan. She used black-and-white film for photography projects between 1975 and 1978. The negatives were neatly kept in dated order inside a glassine negative index file. About 800 black-and-white negatives exist. The photographs may have been made for a beginning photography class at the university.
To document Detroit, Bahnmiller mainly used slide film, which was held in binders connected to her urban projects. From slides she would print color Xeroxes. Handmade prints of the photographs don’t show up in her estate or archive, suggesting prints were never made. Photography subjects included outings at Cedar Lake and Silver Lake, Pickney and Milan, Michigan, camping in Saginaw, her family home, and a vacation in Florida. A few images contain artistic photography from a series of rotting squash, self-portraits, and nudes taken in a meadow.
Read next: Books and Quotations, inside Doom and Glory in the Cass Corridor: A Dossier on Cay Bahnmiller by Cary Loren
Founded in 2020, Three Fold is
an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art,
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