Photos from the Wystan Stevens Slide Collection

Above is a self-portrait by Wystan Stevens, taken in a mirror in the shop window of Ragtop in 1977.

In 2017, two years after the death of local historian Wystan Stevens, an auction of his many collections was held.  The Ann Arbor District Library Archives at that time acquired what it considered the prize of the entire proceeding: a set of dozens of slide cases containing tens of thousands of photographs taken by Wystan, mostly in the 1970s.

At one time, everyone in Ann Arbor knew Wystan Stevens.  He was the pontificator sharing endless facts with the morning crew at Washtenaw Dairy.  He was the bookseller at the folding table hawking paperbacks all over town for ridiculously low prices.  He was the commenter on numerous Facebook and Flickr pages, adding voluminous detail to each post he encountered.  He was the guide with the booming baritone that carried across Forest Hill Cemetery as he gave his regular tours, familiarizing generations with the history written in stone.  And he was the historian who seemed to have the entire history of the city in his head but who rarely wrote anything longer than an article to get it all down for people.  

Wystan was also, for most of the 1970s, the man with the camera hanging around his neck who took photographs of seemingly any and everything in town in an attempt to create a photographic portrait of the city.  He photographed the grand and the ordinary.  People he knew and complete strangers.  Big events and typical days.  People at work and people at play and people who might be doing either (or both).  There seemed to be no topic in which he was not interested, no subject beneath consideration in his document of the community.

As it has now been nearly a decade since Wystan's death and there are many who never had the chance to know him in any of his incarnations, here is the briefest of summaries.  He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, graduating from Ann Arbor High School in 1961, and he added gown to town by majoring in history at the University of Michigan.  He then spent his adult life sharing facts about Ann Arbor history, sometimes paid and sometimes free of charge, sometimes as the official city historian and sometimes as just the person many considered the city historian when no person actually held that title.  He gave tours and wrote articles and sold books.  More importantly, he was a larger-than-life figure, a man with a deep Orson Wellesian voice who seemed somehow to take up more space in a room than his already sizeable frame demanded by the force of his personality.

But that doesn't really describe him.  The trouble with writing a piece about Wystan in order to introduce his collection is how exactly to capture him.  Various articles and obituaries have attempted to do so since his death, and none seem quite complete, none really describe the entirety of Wystan Stevens; that is one of the problems with being larger-than-life.  

The truth is that we don't need to describe him; he is already described in the collection itself.  The storefronts, festivals, shoppers, workmen, baseball games, restaurants, gravestones, art galleries, concerts, and architectural details stack up over time as you look at more and more of them, eventually forming not just the portrait of the community Wystan was attempting to compile but an unintentional self-portrait of the photographer.  We see Wystan reflected in the things he took images of; we see who he was in what he saw in Ann Arbor.  

An introductory collection of hundreds of Wystan's photos can be found on our website at aadl.org/wystanphotos.  Fittingly, it is not a complete collection, but one to which we will continue to add over the next several years as we continue to catalog and digitize images.