Detroit at the end of the assembly line: an astonishing record of urban ruin
No longer the Motor City of boom-time industry, the city of Detroit has fallen into an incredible state of dilapidation since the decline of the American auto industry after the Second World War. Today, whole sections of the city resemble a war zone, its once-spectacular architectural grandeur reduced to vacant ruins. In Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore records a territory in which the ordinary flow of time-or the forward march of the assembly line-appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse. For Moore, who throughout his career has been drawn to all that contradicts or seems to threaten America's postwar self-image (his previous projects include portraits of Cuba and Soviet Russia), Detroit's decline affirms the carnivorousness of our earth, as it seeps into and overruns the buildings of a city that once epitomized humankind's supposed supremacy. In Detroit Disassembled, Moore locates both dignity and tragedy in the city's decline, among postapocalyptic landscapes of windowless grand hotels, vast barren factory floors, collapsing churches, offices carpeted in velvety moss and entire blocks reclaimed by prairie grass. Beyond their jawdropping content, Moore's photographs inevitably raise the uneasy question of the long-term future of a country in which such extreme degradation can exist unchecked.
Andrew Moore is best known for his large format photographs of Cuba, Russia, Times Square, Detroit, and most recently, the American High Plains. He graduated from Princeton University in 1979 where he studied with the esteemed photographer Emmet Gowin as well as the photo historian Professor Peter Bunnell. Moore's photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the George Eastman House and the Library of Congress amongst many others. His publications include Cuba (2012), Detroit Disassembled (2010), Russia; Beyond Utopia (2005), Governors Island (2004) and Inside Havana (2002). He currently teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Reviewing Andrew Moore's Detroit Disassembled in The New York Times online, Holly Brubach writes, "The sight of fluorescent moss carpeting a floor or birch trees sprouting from a bed of rotting books signifies for him not--or not only--a boomtown’s tragic collapse but an occasion to devise a new urban paradigm, one that incorporates vast swaths of woods and farmland. Moore’s Detroit, though sparsely populated, is not a ghost town. An East Side man identified as Algernon stares out from his ramshackle porch, his dog perched on the stairs. Schoolchildren pause in the middle of a Highland Park street and solemnly meet the camera’s gaze. Seven friends in hoodies and jeans drink beer on a Foxtown rooftop. It’s harder to dismiss Detroit and its fate in the face of these reminders that the city isn’t dead, that, however deserted its neighborhoods, not everyone has given up and walked away." Featured image is from Detroit Disassembled.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The New York Times
Mike Rubin
Although there is plenty of rubble in “Detroit Disassembled,” Mr. Moore’s work usually escapes the narrow constraints of the genre. His large-scale prints—some up to 5 feet by 6 feet — are sumptuous and painterly, rich in texture and color: the emerald carpet of moss growing on the floor of Henry Ford’s office at the Model T plant, the pumpkin-orange walls of a vandalized classroom at Cass Technical High School, the crimson panels of a former F.B.I. shooting range. Photos like those of the enormous rolling hall at Ford’s River Rouge plant and a sunset over the Bob-Lo Island boat dock were inspired, Mr. Moore said, by 19th-century American landscape painters like Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade.
The Wall Street Journal
Editors
Andrew Moore's 'Detroit Disassembled' (Damiani) concentrates primarly on the factories that formerly drove the economy, now falling apart or gone back to nature, like the Ford office whose floor has grown over with moss.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
FROM THE BOOK
"What we see taking place in Andrew Moore's photographs is no doubt happening everywhere, but it would appear that in Detroit the process has such extraordinary velocity it seems to have stepped out of time to become the sole condition of being. These photographs are among the most beautiful I've ever seen: their calm in the face of the ravages of man and nature confer an unexpected dignity upon the subjects of his camera, the very dignity I had assumed daily life had robbed them of. In Alleyway, East Side, my eye settles on a small sheet of ice that has formed in a wheelbarrow and moves from the ice to the portions of the twigs sticking up though trapped in the ice, and then from the twigs to the barrow's single visible handle and then to the black trunk of a tree that snakes its way upward through the half-light trapped between two buildings. The trunk continues upward toward...toward what it doesn't know, and yet it continues to rise."
On Thursday, May 13, the Strand Bookstore hosted a conversation between photographer Andrew Moore and poet Philip Levine on Moore's new book Detroit Disassembled. Levine began by reading a few poems inspired by his hometown of Detroit, and told stories of his youth there. Moore described his experiences in today's Detroit, illustrated with slides of images from the book, and CSPAN was there recording the whole thing for an episode of BookTV. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 14 x 11 in. / 136 pgs / 72 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9788862081184 PUBLISHER: Damiani/Akron Art Museum AVAILABLE: 4/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Damiani/Akron Art Museum. Text by Andrew Moore, Philip Levine.
Detroit at the end of the assembly line: an astonishing record of urban ruin
No longer the Motor City of boom-time industry, the city of Detroit has fallen into an incredible state of dilapidation since the decline of the American auto industry after the Second World War. Today, whole sections of the city resemble a war zone, its once-spectacular architectural grandeur reduced to vacant ruins. In Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore records a territory in which the ordinary flow of time-or the forward march of the assembly line-appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse. For Moore, who throughout his career has been drawn to all that contradicts or seems to threaten America's postwar self-image (his previous projects include portraits of Cuba and Soviet Russia), Detroit's decline affirms the carnivorousness of our earth, as it seeps into and overruns the buildings of a city that once epitomized humankind's supposed supremacy. In Detroit Disassembled, Moore locates both dignity and tragedy in the city's decline, among postapocalyptic landscapes of windowless grand hotels, vast barren factory floors, collapsing churches, offices carpeted in velvety moss and entire blocks reclaimed by prairie grass. Beyond their jawdropping content, Moore's photographs inevitably raise the uneasy question of the long-term future of a country in which such extreme degradation can exist unchecked.
Andrew Moore is best known for his large format photographs of Cuba, Russia, Times Square, Detroit, and most recently, the American High Plains. He graduated from Princeton University in 1979 where he studied with the esteemed photographer Emmet Gowin as well as the photo historian Professor Peter Bunnell. Moore's photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the George Eastman House and the Library of Congress amongst many others. His publications include Cuba (2012), Detroit Disassembled (2010), Russia; Beyond Utopia (2005), Governors Island (2004) and Inside Havana (2002). He currently teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
