Movies | January 02, 2011 | 10 comments

The Ruins of Detroit: A Sad Narrative of Urban Life in America

source: http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/the-ruins-of-detroit-a-sad-narrative-of-urban-li...

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“The Ruins of Detroit” is a powerful and disturbing collection of photographs, which are the result of a five-year collaboration by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. “The Ruins of Detroit” tells the city’s story in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, adding up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses and gutted skyscrapers chronicled by Marchand and Meffre are the artefacts of Detroit’s astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place exemplifies both the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.

In addition to these remarkable photographs, this piece presents a memorable slide show of additional images from the collection and a documentary short film. “Pure Detroit” is a short film by Ivan George with gorgeous cinematography, but it’s also one that confronts the viewer with dramatic images of the collapse and decay that rapid economic and social change can have upon urban life. The impact of the film has been described as somewhere between heaven, hell and quiet meditation. While “Pure Detroit” is a beautiful visual mood piece, it’s also incredibly sad. The film reveals so much about the rapid changes we’re encountering in our world right now, how the old things gets broken much faster than new things are put in their place. “Pure Detroit” serves as a powerful reminder of what the old things breaking down can be like for so many of us.

Again, this piece includes a number of striking high-resolution photographs, a memorable slide show and a documentary short film.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/the-ruins-of-detroit-a-sad-narrative...
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