Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Beautiful destruction

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies
and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time :
being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.

Photography appeared to us as a modest way
to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state."

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre


                                  The Ruins of Detroit 


Up and down Detroit’s streets, buildings stand abandoned and in ruin. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city. Their book “The Ruins of Detroit“, a document of decaying buildings frozen in time, was published in December 2010.





"Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire."

















A whole city of wabi-sabi , sad beauty, poised for a brief moment in time. Captured forever by these amazing photographs.



A.MUse

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