Detroit in Ruins

William Livingstone House, Brush Park, a French Renaissance-style house designed by Albert Kahn in 1893 and demolished since this photograph was taken. Photograph © Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

I've spent part of every summer for the past dozen and a half years in southeast Michigan and have mixed feeling about the region. On the one hand, Ann Arbor where I teach is too preening and precious for my taste - by a considerable amount. On the other hand, Detroit - which I have to traverse in each direction to get to Ann Arbor - makes me cringe. It is an amplified version of the political economic disasters in Rochester and the other urban areas across Western NY. Each of these cities is an extremely unflattering monument to both capitalism and political corruption. I've posted here about Detroit several times and about Rochester  here  more than that. In any case, The Guardian has run this series of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of the crumbling ruins of Detroit. They remind me of work Robert Polidori and others have done on the 'exclusion zones' surrounding Chernobyl. I've posted on that work here a couple of times before. In this instance the catastrophe was economic implosion rather than technological and ecological disaster. These images are very, very far from a complete portrait of Detroit. But they convey an important dimension of what is wrong with the US these days.

Exclusion Zones (2) ~ Jake Baggaley

A reader replied to my earlier post on convergences around the Chernobyl exclusion zones, suggesting that I check out work by a friend Jake Baggaley. Turns out that this was a great tip (Thanks Tom!). Baggaley is a talented young photographer who did a senior project on the "dead zone"; his work is really remarkable. You can find an interview with him here where he discusses doing the project.

Exclusion Zones

In the Exclusion Zones*

Carolyn Forché

Ash over conifers and birches, over berry tickets. Resembling snow and
its synonyms. Silvered fields of millet.

A silence approaching bees of the invisible or the scent of mint.

One need not go further than a white towel hung in an open door.

~~~~~~~~~~

Chernobyl, Ukraine (2009) © Timm Suess.

Village cemetery, October 1998 © David McMillan.

Chernobyl, Classroom in Kindergarten #7,
"Golden Key", Pripyat - May 2001 © Robert Polidori.

I recently started to track down photographic work on post-Katrina NOLA and realized that Robert Polidori's project After the Flood apparently is very much of a piece with his somewhat earlier project Zones of Exclusion on post-nuclear-meltdown Chernobyl. And, as I searched for Polidori's images, I came across similar - extremely good - work by Timm Suess and David McMillan. (Follow links above to their pages.) All that then led me to recall Carolyn Forché' s poem. Funny how those convergences work themselves out.
__________
* From: Carolyn Forché. Blue Hour. Harper Collins, 2003, page 18.