The Ruins of Detroit

 

   Near the end of the year, I am cleaning out various email compartments and in one of them found a reference to this book: Detroit in Ruins. It is from a decade ago when I learned about the book from this review: “Detroit in Ruins: The Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre,” Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, Jan. 2, 2011. The subtitle: “In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America.” That is one of their photographs above.

There you see another one. The reason I noticed and kept the review is that the photographs in it were beautiful, even though they recorded devastation. As the reviewer notes: This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing....They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors that once made up the city's civic infrastructure: courthouses, churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public libraries and swimming pools, all of which have most of their original fixtures and fittings intact.

You can still read the review and fortunately view some of the photographs, as well. The place to begin is at the Marchand Meffre website. More can be found at the publisher - Steidl. The price of the book is listed at 88 euros, but it is out of print.

If you wish to purchase your own copy, it now will cost you a bit more. Unfortunately it wasn't purchased by a London public library, or by Western.

I wrote about Steidl, "the best printer in the world," in my post about Gasoline Stations. For a fine Canadian printer, see Lumiere Press and Michael Torosian.