24 hours of London gallery hopping
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photos make the city of Detroit look like a post-industrial Pompeii. Abandoned hotels, derelict theatres, ruined workplaces, empty schools: it’s as if the people left everything they had created behind when they fled the city. Shot between 2005 and 2009, Marchand and Meffre’s The Ruins Of Detroit, a selection of which are currently on show at London’s Wilmotte Gallery until April 5, track the dramatic, extraordinary decline of a great city. It’s all the starker when you consider the snapshots and statistics displayed at the outset of the exhbition about what the Motor City once was in its pomp, a city of extraordinary factories which employed thousands, a city of power, money and industrial prestige.
There are many in Detroit who will vehemently argue that such ruin porn doesn’t tell the whole picture. Marchand may believe that “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die”, but many community activists in the city will point to their efforts to make the city work again. Regardless of which side you’re on in that particular argument, there’s no doubt that these photos on this scale tell all kinds of poignant, heartbreaking, horror stories. You look at the American Hotel ballroom or the Eastown Theatre, rooms which were once full of life and gaiety, and you realise that, even in the 21st century, an urban powerhouse like Detroit can come apart at the seams.
Michigan Central Station
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