Photo and audio exhibition chronicles life in Delray before the bridge

Industry has been chipping away at the homes of Delray for decades now. Walk a couple of blocks in any direction and you're going to stumble across some sign of manufacturing or shipping. And it's going to take more than a couple of blocks to escape that smell, a byproduct of the poor air quality in one of Michigan's most polluted ZIP code.

Roughly 2,500 residents remain in a neighborhood that once had nearly ten times as many. The streets of Delray reflect the population loss. As for the houses that do remain, many of those are already slated for demolition, as they stand in the path of the New International Trade Crossing. While some residents have been bought out to make way for the new bridge, that's not true for everyone.

But for all the words outsiders throw around when describing Delray -- desolate, devastated, polluted -- what is it actually like for the people who live there? That's what photographer Kenny Corbin, a.k.a. Karpov, and audio journalist Laura Herberg set out to discover. They spent two months in the yards, family rooms, and kitchens of the residents there, documenting the lives of 40 people by taking photographs and collecting audio. Karpov and Herberg are debuting the results of their work with "Delray: Beyond Isolation," a multimedia exhibition that opens today at Galerie Camille in Midtown.

"People there feel that if the city wants to make all of Delray industrial, then everyone should be bought out," says Karpov. "The residents don't want to lose out in the bridge development. They want to feel compensated. They want to feel acknowledged."

In the two months since beginning this project, Karpov says they've collected more photographs and audio than they'll be able to use. Karpov and Herberg, who met at WDET, didn't want to just show up for an hour, take some pictures, and split. They wanted to immerse themselves in Delray and tell its story -- before the bridge.

Delray: Beyond Isolation opens at Galerie Camille on Friday, Nov. 21 at 5 p.m. Galerie Camille is located at 4130 Cass Ave. in Midtown.

Source: Kenny 'Karpov' Corbin, Delray: Beyond Isolation photographer
Writer: MJ Galbraith

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