The Ruins of Detroit Images from the Future Destruction of the Modern City

It is not easy to reproduce that unique feeling of vertigo over the nostalgia for a luminous past, the concerning evidence of the present, and the sense of dread for the seemingly inevitable destruction of the modern city that Detroit has communicated for decades after the process of deindustrialization started in the mid-1960s, but the work of French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre successfully accomplished this apparently impossible task. Marchand and Meffre were born in 1981 and 1987 in the Parisian suburbs, their lenses being trained in areas of contradictions, conflicted margins, and modern ruins shot in France and abroad. Between 2005 and 2010 the artistic duo frequently traveled to the United States to document the state of urban and architectural decay of the city of Detroit. At the same time, they started a photographic project on old American theaters, both abandoned and converted. In 2008 and 2012 they also undertook two trips to Japan to record Gunkanjima, an island that turned industrial at the end of the nineteenth century and is now deserted.

Observing the scope and breadth of their photographic projects (Budapest Courtyards, 2014-16; Theaters, 2005-21; Gunkanjima, 2008-12), it stands out how Marchand and Meffre are intrigued by the passing of time over human aspirations, architectural exuberance, and modern velleity. In a broader sense, their photographs are put at the service of the most pressing questions about the frailty of urban landscapes and the evanescence of civic sense in modern and contemporary times. 

Detroit’s photos taken by Marchand and Meffre seem to capture a city hurriedly abandoned, as it was hit by a disastrous earthquake in the night, an immediate nuclear catastrophe, or an unexpected military attack. In an extreme heroic gesture, the modern ruins of Detroit appear to pose in front of the photographic lens as “the last remains of a great civilization” [p. 224].

However, Detroit was not abandoned because of a sudden apocalypse. The quick rise of the city started in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to the presence of natural resources and grew at the whirling rhythm of the assembly lines of the automotive manufacturers that set up along the Detroit River. The city soon became known as the global capital of the automobile industry and, for the first five decades of the Twentieth century, the economic and commercial success of the “three sisters” – Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors – made Detroit the wealthiest city in the US and the fourth most populous one. The collapse of the urban splendor of the city followed the relocation of the automobile companies far from Michigan State, an industrial process that caused the economic and civic agony of Detroit as soon as the 1960s. 

For their project on the urban downfall of the city of Detroit, Marchand and Meffre used one single large format camera and published their work into a precious landscape folio-size book. Thanks to the lavish format, the images collected in the volume The Ruins of Detroit have the ability to perceptively transfer the observer into the interior space of a dusty hotel room, on the windy roof of a dismantled industrial plant, or in front of a cracking red-bricks Victorian house just about to collapse in front of our very eyes. The flat images assembled by Marchand and Meffre suggest sounds, smells, and even tactile perceptions, in a sort of compelling synesthetic experience that goes beyond the mere visual and aesthetic appreciation of their work.

“It’s rare that wide-angle panorama images have such a psychological power or that these locations retain such strong emotional traces so long after their abandonment” [pp. 7-8], writes Robert Polidori in the Foreword to the book. And yet, the tiniest and apparently insignificant details of the images effectively capture our attention and haunt our imagination: the glass test tubes of a school laboratory shattered on the tables; the moldy court files scattered on the floor of a police station; a dentist's chair surrounded by medical instruments mixed with plaster falling from the ceiling; the silent streets of the city, too dark and empty at dusk. Every detail helps us reconstruct the urban life that used to be, and no longer is. Even more dramatically, every piece of rubble acts as a warning: it can be seen as revealing not of the past but, on the contrary, of a future scenario of deterioration of urban values already effective in Detroit, the epitome of the ambitions of modernity, the industrial city par excellence.

Marchand and Meffre turned their camera lens to interior spaces in disrepair as well as broader urban vistas, wide and dreary. All the almost 200 photographs presented in the book are accompanied by short comments by the authors, that inform us of the original function of the building pictured on the page, and often of the exact date of its collapse or demolition. In the words of the two photographers, the objective of their work was to create “a tribute to these ruins, a testament to decline in its most realistic, and therefore most poignant form”.

As Thomas J. Sugrue writes in the opening essay of the book: “There is no better place than Detroit to observe the dialectical forces of modern capitalism, often in their most exaggerated forms. Detroit is a place of both permanence and evanescence, of creation and destruction, of monumentality and disposability, a place of placelessness, of power and disempowerment” [p. 9]. Maybe, the life cycle of the city of Detroit has not yet terminated, and from the debris, something new can flourish again. Starting from 2022, Detroit is witnessing an increase in population for the first time in more than sixty years. The data collected by the US Census Bureau spread a little hope after decades of urban desolation. And in fact, the Latin motto of the city is “Speramus Meliora. Resurget Cineribus”: we hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes. More than a motto, an actual, optimistic premonition.