In 1972, Don Hudson made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. After spending time drifting through liberal arts courses at a university, he committed fully to photography and enrolled at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit, Michigan — the school now known as the College for Creative Studies. It was there, on the streets of Detroit, that he picked up his camera and started documenting the city around him.
Detroit in 1973 was a city in transition. The auto industry still drove the local economy, but the urban landscape carried visible signs of strain. Neighborhoods were shifting, storefronts were changing hands, and the streets held the kind of everyday life that rarely makes it into official history books. Hudson was there with his camera, shooting all of it.
As a student, Hudson had direct access to the city’s streets and its people. The Society of Arts and Crafts gave him a framework for thinking about photography seriously — not just as a hobby, but as a lifelong practice. That shift in mindset is clear in the images he made during this period. They are deliberate and observant, the work of someone learning to truly look.
Hudson only stayed at the school for two years. But he has described that short time as the most important of his photographic education. The key lesson wasn’t technical. It was the ability to see photography as something worth committing to for an entire lifetime — a way of engaging with the world that doesn’t end when a class does.
The Detroit these photos capture is now more than fifty years in the past. Buildings, businesses, and faces from 1973 exist in these frames in ways they no longer exist anywhere else. That’s what street photography does — it freezes a specific moment in a specific place, making the ordinary permanent.
What stands out across Hudson’s Detroit work is his eye for the unremarkable. He wasn’t chasing dramatic events. He was paying attention to the texture of daily life — the kind of scenes most people walk past without a second glance. That patience and attention are what make these images worth looking at today.
