In Focus: Documenting an Emerging Art and Music Residency in Detroit
Photographing a long-term project in a city that's known for music, art and innovation.
IT WAS A GRAY AFTERNOON IN LATE NOVEMBER, and the first thing I noticed as I approached the old brick house on Hogarth Street were the wildflowers winding through the yard — somehow still cheerfully in bloom, despite the autumn chill that had hung in the air all week.
Although the flowers had not been there the last time I’d visited nearly four years earlier, it was difficult to imagine a time when they weren’t. Like the house, they were defiant of their fate, unwilling to assume the frail role expected of them. With winter looming, their bold colors seemed to herald the return of vitality to a neighborhood long deprived of it. They belonged there, and they weren’t going anywhere without a fight.
In the front yard, Alexander Vlachos, a Detroit-based folk musician known as Greater Alexander and the founder of the Greater Impact House — the house I was now standing in front of — greeted me and guided me toward the door. Inside, Vlachos’ wife and project partner, Karianne Spens-Hanna, a professional art therapist, was doing a final sweep, turning on lights and ensuring coats and shoes were put away so each room of the house was ready to be photographed.
It was not the first time I’d photographed the Greater Impact House in Detroit’s Petoskey-Otsego neighborhood. In August 2020, while on assignment for a feature for Model D Media, a local digital news magazine, I visited the house when it was still in a state of deep disrepair to interview Vlachos and document the early stages of its renovation.
A land bank purchase, the now 113-year-old house had endured a long period of neglect that left it in need of significant repairs. In 2020, the front porch had threatened to collapse, the bathrooms needed to be fixed, holes adorned the walls and floors, the roof needed to be replaced, and the house was without heating or cooling. The house’s condition rendered it unlivable and mostly unusable at the time, except for short-term recording projects in rooms that were in better shape.
Despite those challenges, Vlachos and Spens-Hanna remained committed to transforming the dilapidated house into a safe, substance-free, short-term residency for mid-career artists and musicians visiting Detroit. Someday, they hoped, creatives would be able to fly into town from anywhere in the world to stay and work at the house in Detroit — a city whose legacy has always been about music, art and innovation.
At the time, I was already aware of the ambitious projects Vlachos was capable of undertaking. Over half a decade earlier, in 2014, I had photographed and interviewed him for HOUR Detroit magazine for a story about a music video from his then-recently-released album Bag of Bones. The video, which required a rigorous daily filming routine, documented Vlachos’s intense year-long personal transformation as he recorded the album.
Still, bringing the Greater Impact House to life felt like a Herculean task — although, by the time I left on that summer afternoon in 2020 after photographing it for my story, I had no doubts that Vlachos and Spens-Hanna would eventually achieve their goals.
By November 2024, it was clear that I was right. While it might have taken longer than anyone had hoped — and cost more than anyone would have liked — the project was finally starting to take shape, and 2025 would surely be a good year for the project’s ongoing progress.
Although my pitch for a follow-up story about the project went ignored after I learned the house was finally hosting high-profile music events (the Acoustic Guitar Project was held at the Greater Impact House this November), I decided to try to photograph the project’s progress anyway. Thankfully, even without a home for the story in a traditional outlet, Vlachos and Spens-Hanna graciously allowed me to photograph them and document the house’s transformation.
And that transformation, although still in progress, has been impressive. While securing funding and finding contractors willing to work within the project’s budget has presented challenges over the years, since 2020 Vlachos and Spens-Hanna have managed to rebuild the roof, install a ramp alongside the house for accessibility, tear down the front porch, patch the walls and get several of the interior rooms back into working condition, including the bathrooms and an upstairs kitchen.
The pair also knocked out a wall in the downstairs dining room, creating a performance space with room for a future kitchen that will allow the project to eventually house two resident artists simultaneously. Recently, Vlachos was also able to acquire the lot next door, where the pair planted an outdoor wildflower garden with space for live music and events.
During both of my visits to photograph the Greater Impact House in its various stages of restoration, I worked to document not only the broader story of its renovations but also the smaller details that made up the experience of transforming an abandoned house in Detroit into a creative space for visiting artists and musicians.
Those details, from a photojournalistic perspective, were necessary for adding a human element and bringing to life a story that might have otherwise offered only a surface-level glimpse of a much longer, deeper, more significant process.
Included among those details were the historic objects discovered by Vlachos and Spens-Hanna throughout the renovation process — like the mysterious portrait of a woman (pictured above), possibly from the 1800s, that fell out of the ceiling where it had been hidden by a previous resident during repairs in one of the upstairs rooms; a manual about the dangers of nuclear fallout from the Cold War era (also pictured above); old family photos and a box of collected letters.
Among other items from various decades dating back nearly a century, the found objects are now displayed in a cabinet where visitors and future resident artists can appreciate them and find inspiration in the house’s history.
Although the Greater Impact House is still a work in progress — depending on funding, Vlachos says installing a kitchen on the first floor and replacing the front porch are priorities for 2025 — having the opportunity to document the ongoing progress of an art and music residency, created from scratch by local musicians and artists in Detroit, has been rewarding.
As a photographer and journalist who believes in keeping her boots on the ground as she works, there are also some important lessons I’ve learned while witnessing the project take shape over time in a changing city: Community is everything. We all have a calling to become a greater version of ourselves. And nothing is ever lost forever. Eventually, someone with fresh eyes and good intentions and enough moxie will come along and do what others could, or would, not. The rest, of course, will become history.
To see more photos of the Greater Impact House’s transformation between 2020 and 2024, visit the project page on my website.
You can also follow the Greater Impact House on Substack: