detroit - city of contrasts
Horizontality is the defining dimension of Detroit's vast expanse of low-lying dwellings and reclaimed "prairies". It is the city's spirit of place, which competes with the verticality of its churches and of downtown, visible from so many corners of the urban setting. But downtown is a remote presence, a distant, shining city on a hill, with its illusory promises of wealth, excess, and glory. The other defining feature of Detroit is its intense dynamism, truly Schumpeterian in the economic and social realm, and embodied by infrastructures that foster movement in real life and evoke it visually, especially its highways, which promoted the expansion of, and simultaneously maimed the fabric of the city. I experience Detroit's highways more as an hydraulic system than as an urban road network. What stands apart in this landscape is Detroit's older churches, so numerous and so varied, in denomination and shape. They proudly assert their power to escape the horizontality of the city, to challenge secular verticality, and to reach a different dimension. I have chosen black & white because Detroit's history is central to the industrial and social process of modernization, in all its aspects. I have included buildings and views that have left their impression on myself as a flâeneur, the urban stroller who is inseparable from our modern experience of the city. 13x19 Edition: 7+2AP, 2019 Archival pigment print on Canson Baryta paper INQUIRE |
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