The Dudes Are Alright

My friend Michael Miller at the Observer called it “ruin porn,” Elmore Leonard wrote in the forward that “maybe that old machinery isn’t as ugly as I thought,” and The New Yorker and Vogue both paid attention to it.  The new book, Detroit: 138 Square Miles isn’t photos of the once-thriving Motor City in its heyday; rather, it’s the here and now.  Julia Reyes Taubman spent six years taking nearly 30,000 photos working on Detroit, and the best of those is in this collection.  The book appeals on a visceral level, but also gives you moments to pause and think, “Could this happen to my city if it happened to the heart of America?”  (Answer: yup.)  It’s a comely and eerie work, one that seems to have started out as a hobby, but turned into a labor of love for a city.

I spent my childhood driving through the rustbelt on my way to hockey tournaments and family vacations.  I’m from one of the Midwestern metropolises that somehow managed to crawl out of the rubble from America’s industrial collapse (Chicago), so to get out and see the effects all around me as a child had an impact that I can’t explain.  The burnt out buildings of Gary, IN., the rusted carcasses of factories in various parts of Ohio, and the ruins in cities like Milwaukee and Pittsburgh.  Reyes Taubman’s photos show what’s left of Detroit in all its glory, offering little commentary or lip service as to the city’s supposed rebirth that the media likes battering around so much, but leaving you with a sense of hope that things can only go up.