Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre: “The Ruins of Detroit”

The Ruins of Detroit is a five-year collaboration between French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. Together they have documented Detroit’s abandoned buildings, bringing to light the current state of ‘Motor City’ through a cinematic series of starkly beautiful photographs.

Shooting with a large format, custom-made camera and taking advantage of natural light using long exposures, the images embody the unique atmosphere of each location. Marchand and Meffre’s work retains a formal quality and is conceived as a document, giving the viewer a surreal glimpse of Detroit’s former glory. Like the great civilizations of the past, we interpret them through their remains.

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension. (Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre)

The images bring to mind a Biblical disaster; it is as if all Detroit’s citizens had fled. The abandoned factories and buildings, vacant schools and derelict ballrooms, to name but a few, are a poignant reminder of the fragility of the modern world and, possibly on a different scale, of a now ‘broken America’. These beautiful, but disturbing, images look un-compromisingly at the remains of the once-astonishing Detroit, as a then global center of capitalism and its following, even more extraordinary, descent into ruin. One is reminded of Detroit’s prophetic motto: Speramus meliora, resurget cineribus (‘We hope for better things, which shall rise from the ashes’)