My family was part of the mid-20th century exodus out of the Motor City, when, in 1964, my father and mother packed up their three very young children and headed west, to the promise of a better life in sunny So Cal.. My memories of those early days in Detroit are faded and few, but I still feel a sense of connection to my birthplace.. The following photographs, to me, are both beautiful and sad..

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Another collection:

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Good God...
It's images like these that make me wonder sometimes whether beauty and horror are like the convex and the concave: inseparable...
I was struggling to find a bit of subject matter for a poem, and after seeing these pics, Perse, I couldn't consider anything else. So thank you, I suppose. Though I worry myself--at times I feel almost glad that degradation like this exists. It's conducive. I have to remind myself that everything we do should be done in order to put a stop to this kind of thing.
Which is the means again? And which the end?

I suppose the photographers were exploiting poverty for their own purposes, crunchy, but beyond their obvious artistic value, these photos are a historical documentation of man made decline .. and as such, they are important for that reason..

I do respond emotionally to the powerful images, but I am also aware that there is a city, and its people, still alive and kicking, just off camera..

There has been a long standing fascination with ruins: indeed it forms one of the central motifs of romanticism. At some point the rich built fake ruins in their gardens to contemplate, and of course how many vacations are structured around Greek and Italian relics of their glorious past (not so glorious for the slaves and conquests.)

Will tours be organized to see the ruins of Detroit? Maybe the Europeans will be more fascinated than the folks in the suburbs.

In another way Detroit represented mobility; the car was the totem of American freedom. This freedom was often a form of desertion, of the home, of the city for the suburb or even migration to a different state. This freedom has a cost, as we can see.

i'm sorry. i didn't have anything constructive to add to this thread, and i shouldn't have posted in it.

Not at all, Crunchy. You're as entitled to an opinion as anybody else. Probably more so than most.
My point was simply that we as an artistic species have become so good at exploiting the poignancy of horror, poverty, malaise, destruction, entropy, etc. that we've begun to devalue human life in favor of aesthetic beauty...when the point of any artistic work should be to combat this very devaluation in the first place. In that way the differences between aesthetic pursuits and, say, the impersonal forces of capitalism, mechanization, international conflict, and political/religious zealotry are shrinking every day. And I'm just as susceptible to it as anybody.

I find my reaction is very different. I see a ruined city. Do the photos reveal the totality of the human experience of contemporary Detroit, and explain the economic forces that led to this situation? No, they don't have to. They are documents, filtered and selective to be sure, but still valid.

Photography is always suspect because it presents itself as objective. When Robert Frank's book of American photographs was first issued, it was condemned as being a relentless and negative characterization of that society. Now they are lauded, because we accept them as "true." They always were about him as much as the subject matter, the act of viewing and selecting was his vision. We just find his downbeat images a less direct commentary with the passage of time; distance implies objectivity.

In fact all visual arts are held to a different standard than, say music. How many people demand that every song be a definite statement of the economic and social conditions we live under. That the form of music always be subservient to the content and message? Not too many.

I thought ALL art was non-objective and participatory. The viewer/listener is just as active and valid a judge as the artist, even if his/her judgments are at odds with those of the artist. But that's just politically incorrect 'ol me.

Ken Burns said something to the effect of 'we re-write history every time we view it' and that 'history is not static, but fluid.' I would agree. Even documentaries are not objective.

E=mc2 proves nothing is static: everything is is motion.

Detroit: too broke to bury their dead

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