Whoa! We've been doing interviews on this blog for a couple of years now, but this one is definitely a personal highlight for me. I've been very fortunate to get to know Ko this year as she has been working on a project called The Heart Of Detroit; documenting people from all walks of life from Detroit through photos and interviews during the coronavirus pandemic. She's put a ton of work into this project, and you might also know her from her time playing fuzz guitar in The Dirtbombs or DJing on Little Steven's Underground Sirius/XM 21. Please check out the incredible Heart Of Detroit photo-essays and enjoy our very own interview with Ko below!
RR: Thank you for doing this interview! Can you tell us about your project
“The Heart of Detroit”?
Ko: I started the Heart of Detroit when the Federal Government announced that they were going to be giving out “Small Business Loans” (PPP). When the list of businesses that received them was announced, I got really angry. The Lakers/ Ruth Chris’ Steak House? Since when are places like that “Small businesses?” So I spent a few day being angry. like really angry. When I finally settled down, I thought, “ there has to be something that I can do to turn this anger into something else.” But that led to another problem, what could a person like me do? I’m not a doctor, scientist, business person and I don’t have any money. How can one person like me do anything to make a change or do anything?
I sat down for a few days and really thought about it and tried to think about what I have going for me, what I’m good at. Because of The Dirtbombs and my show on Little Steven’s Underground Garage Siriusxm, I have decent social media following, I know that I can talk to people and I can take pictures ( I took the photos for the cover of the 1st White Stripes LP and a few singles) so why not start an Instagram page where I post a picture a day of someone in black and white wearing a face mask and write a bio? Part 2 would be post covid and I would go back and take photos of everyone I’d already taken photos of but in COLOR!
Before I could get this off the ground, I talked to my friend Joseph Patel, who is a master of Media. He lives in NYC and w’ve been friends for awhile and he’s always given me great advice. I told him my idea and he said “You’re gonna have a hard time getting people to start following a page so you should start posting on the new page and on all the rest of your social media until you reach like 1,000 followers? So I started contacting people. I made a concerted effort to find people who were both friends AND people I didn’t know and started taking photos. I took a test round of 4 and before posting anything I contacted Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and asked if he’d look at the photos and give me tips. He’s got like 4 photobooks out so it was really helpful to have someone give me some help on that front as well. the first couple weeks were weird because we were still in lockdown and the tabs on my car had expired. Plus, no one really had much to say because none of us knew anything. but that all changed when George Floyd was murdered. After that, people had so much to say and the project sort of became a different animal.
I should actually say that the project is constantly evolving. I didn’t realize that this project was going to be so much work. Naively, I hoped that this whole thing would be done by the end of the year when I started. So the reality of posting a person every single day sinks in, the fact that not only am I not getting paid but I’m spending money that I can’t afford to spend started to hit me. Luckily, by this point, the project had really begun to take off and people started donating gas money, which was an enormous amount of help. Crazy good things have happened because of this project. I’ve made more friends in the last 5 months that in the last 4 years of my life but most importantly, I’ve been able to share people’s stories with real results. I took pictures of Harriette Brown (Chef Bee), who passes out meals at the Road Parks transit center every wednesday at 6p an wrote about how she passed out 700 meals in 10 minutes. How she relies on donations from local chefs for food and can only do it once a week because she prepares the meals from her home and has no funding. two days later, a Developer named Rick Stanza contacted me and asked how he could help her. I put them in touch and now he’s buying her a building so she will have a space with cold storage to work out of. People understand the importance of community so I did a fund raiser for myself (because my car was staring to make all sorts of weird noises) and asked for $400 with a 5 day end date.
At the end of the 5 days, I had raised $4,200. Too much money for me. so I set aside the initial $800 for car repairs for myself and then donated the rest to people who I had featured in my posts.After I donated the money, I got a message from a man named David Reagan who said that he’d been following the project and wanted to give but didn’t feel comfortable putting his credit card on the internet and offered to look at my car and fix whatever he could for free as his way of making a donation. So that freed up more money for me to donate! I really want people to get even a little bit of good news, a sense of community and if my project can do that, I’m doing my 70+ hour a week unpaid job hahaha.
What do you hope people take away from viewing the photos and interviews?
I hope that people will look at my project and know that they are not alone, whatever they are feeling isn’t wrong. I want people to feel like they have a new friend in reading each of my posts. We are a community and if the federal government isn’t going to help us, the people in the project are good people. We all need to do something, no matter how small. It’s not enough to repost articles on Facebook or argue with people who aren’t ever going to see your point of view. DO something!
Why Is Detroit a special place for you?
Detroit is home. I’ve travelled all over the world for touring and there is nowhere like Detroit. I don’t know how else to explain it.
Is there a common theme or message you’ve found by speaking with so many people during this difficult time?
Even through all of the turmoil, sadness, anger… people still find hope. There’s always a silver lining. We seem to be learning from all of this, not just Covid, but everything that’s happened in the past 6 months.
Do you have other ideas for projects involving photography?
Is photography something you’d like to pursue more?
Honestly, I have no idea. This project is my everything right now and I really only picked up photography because of this project. I guess we’ll see what happens?
Switching gears to music, have you been playing guitar recently?
Nope. Right now I only have time for my radio show, the project and my Boyfriend and my Dog. Oh and sometimes I sleep. haha
What is the first song you think The Dirtbombs will play when
the band returns to playing shows?
“Start the Party”!
How do you feel about the future of music/art?
This is such a difficult question. Part of the problem here is many venues are out of business or are being sold. Without venues and art galleries, where do the bands play? where do the artists show their art? Many venues and galleries are in “Prime Real Estate” areas and if they can’t afford to keep paying rent or god forbid, have to sell, those places aren’t going to be bought by “Good Samaritans” who will let those spaces remain venues or galleries. They’re gonna end up as luxury condos or parking lots. we need to support groups like https://www.nivassoc.org/
It’s sad really because the US doesn’t support the arts the way Canada or European countries do.