Detroit Disassembled

Detroit Disassembled
Photographs by Andrew Moore
Essay by Philip Levine

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Fort Pontrain, Paris of the Midwest, Motown, Motor City… Throughout its relatively long history, Detroit has been known as many things. Now, we mostly see it as a tragic demise from its grandeur of only two generations ago. In this photo essay entitled Detroit Disassembled, photographer Andrew Moore unabashedly shows us the reality Detroit faces today – crumbling landmarks, deserted factories, pieces of history that are literally rotting. Looking closer, one catches glimpses of artistic surrealism (I never thought I’d see Dalí’s famous melting clocks in real life) or the sublime (the deserted Michigan Central Station is surely as beautiful as it is incredibly frightening). To an outsider, Detroit could easily be mistaken as a battlefield or even a not-so-far-away post-apocalyptic future. At no point in Detroit Disassembled is there a chance to look away.


Through his grim photographs, Moore is silently posing an uneasy question: What now? How do we deal with a city whose history is rotting away, poverty abounds, and land is abandoned and left to be consumed by nature, square miles at a time? The solutions may be as radical as the questions.