I managed to catch Close-up: Photographers at Work: Portraits produced by Rebecca Dreyfus on the ABC's IView before it was taken down today. The film was originally produced for Ovation TV in the US by Maysles Films.

One of the photographers featured was Andrew Moore and It showed him photographing the New York skyline with an 8x10 field camera. In exploring his website I came across his Detroit work. It's Desolation Row I thought as I looked through the series.

Detroit was once the centre and dynamo of industrial America; now it is a city of decay and ruins due to the since the decline of the American auto industry. It has not been replaced by anything else--eg., museums and cutting-edge art galleries. Detroit represents America's ruins.

The book of the series is entitled Detroit Disassembled. Detroit as America's Pompeii. The American reaction is defensive. It is ruins porn. For them the romanticism of decay is a tired cliche.

What is being rejected is the art tradition (eg., Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th century engravings of the fallen civic monuments of ancient Rome and Greece; or Caspar David Friedrich’s 19th century paintings of fallen medieval cathedrals and castles) that uses ruins to remind their viewers of the fall of past great civilizations and to warn that contemporary American empire risks the same fate.

Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn in the New Yorker is not so defensive. She says that as Moore himself says:

the city is filled with thousands of houses, libraries, factories, apartments, and hospitals “abandoned and mostly unguarded, barely salvageable, and slated for demolition that gets delayed year after year.” The pictures depict a ghost town, reminiscent of Robert Polidori’s images of Chernobyl, where everything was left entirely intact, abandoned in an instant but allowed to rot for decades. The primary signs of life in Moore’s photographs come not from humans, but from nature: mossy grass grows in buildings, trees crawl from warehouses, and houses are swallowed whole by reaching vines.

These American industrial ruins are present day America--Detroit is now one-third empty land. It is a world of economic, physical and political insecurity. Presumably, there is also fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world.