Have you ever been to Detroit? Ever witnessed, first hand, that once great American city in all the facets of its decline? If not, let these beautiful photographs take you on that journey now. If you have, revisit what you already know — and what you may never have seen. These poignant, elegant photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre speak volumes about Detroit’s past, present and future.
6 responses
Oh dear, like Chernobyl happened there and everyone scattered.
I went there for a few days back in 2009. It was kind of haunting how empty downtown was. Friday afternoon, Friday night, you name it. But the casinos… those places were packed. Depressing.
I was born and raised in Detroit, and these photos are beautifully shot and elegantly capture one element of the city. But what pisses me off about the whole Detroit ruins craze is it willfully gives the impression that’s most of the story of Detroit–that the real tragedy here is the empty or destroyed beautiful buildings.
Detroit has lost a lot of its population in the last 50 years, but there are still more people living there than in San Francisco. But the people in Detroit are poorer, blacker, much less educated by and large. And therefore, less important. Isn’t the story of people who live in this kind of shit maybe at least a little bit interesting? People–quite probably children–live within a block or two of that Brush Park Victorian. The area around Broderick Tower (which is about to undergo renovation, btw) is a lot of flophouses filled with unemployed or marginally employed people–products of all kinds of misfortune from a generation of trade agreements that fucked Michigan’s major industries to generations of white people afraid of living too close to blacks, to endemic crime, to terrible public schools.
The whole “Detroit is so empty” thing is partially true–it’s not as densely populate as it was at its peak, and the way the depopulation occurred was genuinely catastrophic. It’s a problem when that becomes the thing everyone “knows” about Detroit–when that’s the thing foreign tourist-artists almost exclusively focus on, the thing everyone passes along as an interesting little tidbit. When that happens, it effectively denies the existence of hundreds of thousands of people who live every day among the shitty buildings everyone sees as so sad.
I’m not asking for lazy paeans to the “poor but proud” or anything. But how and why almost a million people continue to live in some semblance of normality in this beaten, destroyed city seems at least as interesting to me as a van parked in a former theater.
N.B. I don’t mean to direct this toward these artists in particular, but at the whole trend of which they are a part.
I agree with Ben on this. There’s a beauty to be found in all those pretty old dilapidated buildings, but pictures like those strip Detroit of its context and its history, not to mention all the positive things being done there today. Some disillusioned residents of Detroit have taken to branding this type of photo-tourism as “ruin porn,” and there’s a great post on Coilhouse about the subject called Detroit Thrives: http://coilhouse.net/2011/01/detroit-thrives
I really appreciate your comments, Ben and Erica. I was taken with the photos for the exact reason you speak of: because it fits my own fantasy of Detroit as a romantically ruined meteropolis – a cautionary tale in brick and stone, if you will.
Of course, I have never actually BEEN to Detroit!
The pics are gorgeous pieces of art. They play heavily into my love of nostalgia and vintage interiors. BUT if I don’t open myself to understand and experience Detroit as it really is – a living city – then I do myself and the city a great disservice.
In a nutshell – I wanted to see the Detroit of these photographs before I read your comments. Now, I want to see the real city even more. I challenge myself to make it up there this year.
Alison, I hope you enjoy your (eventual) visit. It is a strange place–it truly is depressed in a way that’s hard to imagine for most Americans and Europeans. I think you’ll find most Detroiters exceedingly friendly–and this is what bothers me in part about the strong focus on the “ruins.” People in Detroit are dying to tell you their story. Many if not most Detroiters will go out of their way to talk to outsiders about the city–what they love about it, hate about it, their favorite secret places. I’m not a civic booster, Detroit is just too hard to live in for me, but one of the best things about it is the serendipity: you find some amazing place in the middle of what seems like a wasteland. As a visitor, the natives will LOVE telling you where those places are.
Since this is the Rumpus, I’ll tell you to make sure you check out John King, the factory-sized used bookstore.
Although it’s journalism, not fine art, this site has a lot of pretty amazing Detroit stories: detroitblog.org. My favorite is http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=562
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