Detroit Institute of Arts
Through April 8
Call it what you will, just don’t dismiss this show as “ruin porn,” said Michael H. Hodges in The Detroit News. No matter where you live in this country, you’ve probably seen the photographs of apocalyptic urban decay emerging from Detroit in bunches over the past decade, and there are plenty more among the dozens of prints in this “stunningly handsome” eight-artist exhibition. After all, crumbling architecture is a big reason why many photographers now consider the Motor City “America’s most affecting urban tableau.” But there’s “no hint of exploitation” in this show, mainly because it also captures other currents. As one Detroit dies, another is being invented, and some of the strongest work focuses on “the human element so often forgotten” when outsiders cast their gaze on the story unfolding here.
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The DIA’s show has a bit of everything—“beauty and ugliness, progress and stagnation,” said Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. Often, as in the case of Scott Hocking’s Ziggurat—East, Summer (2008), which features a pyramid built from the floor blocks of an abandoned Fisher body plant, “it can be hard to tell the difference between one and the other.” Andrew Moore’s photograph of “a decayed engine shop that’s been turned into a harrowing shanty for the homeless” inspires a simpler response: It “makes you want to scream: How can we allow people to live like this?” Michelle Andonian, meanwhile, documents signs of renewed industry at Ford’s River Rouge plant, and Carlos Diaz captures the “workaday nobility” of the residents of Mexicantown. The competing visions create a tension that you can feel in the air all over town. The Detroit we see here is “a city on the move if not on the make.” Whether it’s “moving forward, backward, or sideways” remains to be determined.
