Detroit.

A brilliant article in The Observer acquainted me with the downfall of Detroit, MI, after the thriving cities motorcar industry fell apart. Whole areas of the city have been left, abandoned, as if a sudden disaster had hit and there was no time for organisation. Parisian photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented the amazing sights in a series of photographs, gathered together in a book 'The ruins of Detroit'.
The buildings photographed include; schools, offices, theatres, swimming pools and hotels, all once grand and lively- full of bustling activity, now left to crumble and rot away. It is a ghost town, and as Sean O'Hagan says in the article, '... a book of testimony, which not only illustrates the dramatic decline of a major American city, but of the American dream itself... Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets.'
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/


It was truly amazing to me that this whole area of desolation is relatively unknown and in such a famous place. Some of the photographs are amazing, and simultaneously, shocking.