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

Excerpt:
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.

[...]

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)
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.