The Point of Documenting Detroit

From http://www.theawl.com/2011/09/whats-...anding-detroit

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What's Really Pornographic? The Point of Documenting Detroit
By Willy Staley

Early this year, John Patrick Leary, a professor of American literature at Wayne State University, published a story in Guernica called "Detroitism" about, primarily, the two competing journalistic and artistic narratives about the Motor City.

There’s the Detroit Lament, which he describes as an examination of the city’s decline that is mostly told through the examination of physical spaces. You may have heard it referred to as "ruin porn." And there’s the Detroit Utopia, stories which purport to show a new way forward for the city, be it through urban farming, $100 homes or bicycling. [[Utopian depictions of Detroit, Leary noted, tend to involve young creative white people.)

Leary used the publication of two recent monographs of photographs Detroit’s ruins as a jumping-off point: Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled [[now on view at the Queens Museum) and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit. He identifies them as a part of a broader “Detroit culture boom,” which has included the massive proliferation of these two types of stories—those that declare that Detroit’s decline marks the end of American postwar prosperity, and those that suggest Detroit is coming back in ways that will create new kinds of prosperity—as well as expanded coverage on television [[“Detroit 187”) and in film [[Gran Torino).

One salient feature of the Detroit Utopia stories that Leary does not identify is the tendency to deny Detroit Lament stories of any and all claims to authenticity. Take, for example, this VICE Magazine article “Something, Something, Something, Detroit” with the subhed “Lazy Journalists Love Photos of Abandoned Stuff.” This story is an excellent example of this unique blend of media criticism and Detroit boosterism. It is singularly dismissive of the utility of photographing Detroit's ruins.

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And young hip Detroiters do benefit directly from the city’s abandonment. It’s a version of Brooklyn gentrification made all the more grotesque because it provides these people with a pedestal of righteousness to stand on and declare that there is nothing wrong with the city.[[read more)

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I must say I sometimes feel this disconnect as well. I suspect though it's because it's far more difficult to understand and address the many issues that face the city than it is to complain about a "snub" by a movie producer comparing Detroit to Prague or to say that a victim of a crime should have known better than to have a GPS in his parked car in the street. I doubt it's malicious, but I also don't think it really does any good in the long run.

Do outsiders, the media, and even other Detroiters make unfair comments about the city or show their ignorance of its history and the reason for its problems? Certainly.

Detroit's boosters [[including myself) often are quick to point out that the city and metro area of 4.5 million are more than just the headlines about violence, economic despair, and abandonment that sell newspapers, coffee books, and magazines. Yet if we are to truly "hope for better things" and have Detroit "rise from the ashes" as the city's motto defiantly declares, then we must be able to acknowledge the good, bad, and truly ugly of our beloved home. Thus is life in the Motor City.

Man, that article is pretty deep, considering I got into urban exploring back in the day because it was fun to do while drinking and hanging out with people/friends. Whoever would have thought that my old hobby would someday be broken down into sub categories of cultural significance. Strange world we live in.

Well, the first part of the article categorizes those two types, but the rest of the article basically says the ruin porn is right because of how bad Detroit is.

About the two competing narratives though, I think a lot of times they actually both work, because both are true. For some people and for some areas Detroit is tons better than it has been in a long time, and for other people and areas the city is far worse than it has ever been.

I think both sides can be wrong though. There genuinely is a lot of great stuff about Detroit and you can have a nice life living in it. But I don't think desolation and poverty adds character or makes the city "unique" [[at least not in a good way), and the emptiness doesn't make it a blank canvas with opportunity [[its an empty field because of the same dysfunction that will keep it a field in the near future), and everything is cheap because it isn't worth anything more.

I guess ruin porn sometimes omits the truth and boosterism sometimes bends the truth.

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Jason / I think both sides can be wrong though. There genuinely is a lot of great stuff about Detroit and you can have a nice life living in it. But I don't think desolation and poverty adds character or makes the city "unique" [[at least not in a good way), and the emptiness doesn't make it a blank canvas with opportunity [[its an empty field because of the same dysfunction that will keep it a field in the near future), and everything is cheap because it isn't worth anything more.

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ever helpful, thanks for the link and your astute commentary, likewise steve bennet and Jason.

Jason, you are right about the desolation and poverty being a product of dysfunction. The empty field
where once there stood a house when multiplied à la Detroit is not a plus in terms of character. The lack of educational success, the quality of offer in retail and the paucity of transit choices will not help rid people of the crime, and will not stop the devaluation of property. But some choices are made by people on a daily basis to effect positive change that really makes the city seem like a blank canvas.

In my city, one of the oldest residential neighborhoods; Griffintown [[close to downtown)was sacrificed to factories over the years until a steady decline in traditional industry turned it into a shithole. But because of its proximity to the city core, developers are rehabbing old brewery bldgs [[I love the smell of hops in the morning) and now are building a mix of condo/office towers along Wellington street. The city and the developers cant do it alone. The region and the state need to step in and work on giving Detroit a new shape, a new outcome. Those empty fields for all we know may turn out to be part of a necklace of urban parkland, punctuated by the most desirable leed housing in the northern US. Detroit needs to change in drastic ways, that may be what the blank canvas mindset is about...

All of this just emphasizes something I've felt for decades: Detroit, and the region around it, comprise a complex pastiche parroting the artistic works of God and man. It attempts to imitate ancient Greece and Rome, modern Boston and Brooklyn, and the various groups of immigrants that have found their way here over the years have added touches of Dublin and Belgrade and Damascus and Nairobi.

It is by far too complicated a thing to try to capture in a twelve hundred word newspaper article or a twelve minute segment on a television news magazine program. It would be like trying to explain Judaism or the theory of evolution on a bumper sticker.

There is a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye tries to intervene in an argument. The first villager makes his point, and Tevye says, "you are right". The second villager gainsays the first man's idea and Tevye says, "you are also right". When a third villager complains to Tevye that the two men can't possibly both be right, he smiles and says with a shrug, "you're right".

That I think is the case in the situation we're discussing on this thread. The people casting aspersions on Detroit, the population flight and the crime and disinvestment, are of course correct; all of those things have happened. The people reporting more or less glowingly on the yuppification of midtown and such things are also discussing things which are actually going on. But none of them are adequately capturing the story.

Marshall Mathers has done a pretty good job over the years capturing a fragment of both parts of the soul of the City [[Eight Mile, the Chrysler commercial, just to name a couple things). Mitch Albom - and I know there are some Mitch haters on the board, but bear with me - has written many articles over the years that have snagged a bit of truth. The late Bob Talbert had an impressive collection as well. If you listen to all of Eminem's work that is Detroit related, read a bunch of Albom and Talbert, seen Gran Torino, and followed this web site over the years, you will have a tiny little inkling of what it is really like here.

But the City has a soul, and the region has a soul, and you can't really get it unless you're here. Unless you've seen Ferndale and midtown and West Vernor and the lower east side, been to Birmingham and the Pointes, eaten at some neighborhood soul food place and walked around a neighborhood where all the signs are in Arabic, and gone bowling in Roseville, you don't know our soul.

So all these attempts to portray Detroit [[and most of them focus on the City; it's a more interesting story) are kind of cartoonish, and always will be. If y'all are reading this and you've never been here, come. One of us will buy you a coney, and I promise we won't tell you what the sauce actually is :)