Contributors: August 2012

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Justin Maconochie

“I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic while photographing fountains for this month’s feature,” Maconochie says. “They remind me of a different time — before television and smart phones took over our culture — when people would gather after dinner, take a stroll, and eat ice cream. Kids tossing coins and making wishes, adults meeting neighbors and friends, the sound of splashing water, and long evenings is quintessential summertime.” Maconochie came away from the assignment considering how the fountains’ relevance in design has remained a constant throughout movements in art. “Although the designs have changed drastically over the centuries, the celebration of water brings people together; we’re drawn to what makes our planet unique.” Maconochie has been capturing our sense of place through his award-winning photography for two decades.

 

Ian Thibodeau

Thibodeau, a University of Detroit Mercy junior, says he didn’t really start writing until his sophomore year. “I took a class taught by a prominent Detroit writer,” he says. “It forced me out of my comfortable, cozy little box at the corner of Livernois and McNichols and into the quirky thing called journalism in metro Detroit.” A communication studies major, Thibodeau also is working to achieve minor certificates in philosophy and business. His experience as a staff writer for The Varsity News at UDM has helped him recognize the skills perfected by many of the writers featured in Hour Detroit, he says. “Detroit is full of fodder for great stories,” Thibodeau says. “Hour Detroit is a fantastic medium through which those stories are told.”

 

Jessica Weber

Weber realized her dream of becoming a journalist while in high school and has pursued it ever since. Now a Penn State senior, she spent the last year writing for her campus newspaper, the Daily Collegian, and reporting on the scandal surrounding her university. “It was an eye-opening experience for me and I realized how important journalists are because they supply crucial information to the community — information that can change the way people think,” Weber says. After completing her junior year, she was ready to return to Michigan for summer days on a lake and interning at Hour Detroit. “Each day, I learn something new about the people of Detroit and the city itself,” Weber says. “There’s so much more to this area than people realize.”

 

Christine Hildebrand

A junior who is threading together two majors at the University of Michigan, Hildebrand recently tied the knot between her disparate academics by custom-tailoring a background in English and Art & Design. After completing a visual-display internship with the retailer Anthropologie, working creative departments at SHEI Magazine, and interning with Hour Detroit, Hildebrand plans to generate a portfolio that reflects her affection for all things beautiful — spinning vintage finds, traded recipes, and local businesses into ideas for stories and inspiration for projects.  Hildebrand says there’s nothing lovelier than pure discovery, which can be repackaged in written words or images to be untied and discovered by others.

 

 


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