Is decay ever beautiful?

  • Post-apocalyptic piano bar?

    detroit-hotel-in-ruins.jpg

    Nope, it’s the lobby of a long-abandoned hotel in Detroit, beau­ti­fully pho­tographed by two French pho­tog­ra­phers as part of a haunt­ing col­lec­tion called “Detroit’s Beau­ti­ful, Hor­ri­ble Decline.” You can see it HERE.

    Are ruins ever beau­ti­ful? The answer, I think, is yes. There’s some­thing appalling, to be sure, in see­ing some­thing that was cre­ated to be so grand left to the rav­ages of time and the ele­ments. I used to be fas­ci­nated dri­ving past the enor­mous infra­struc­ture of U. S. Steel in Gary, Indi­ana in the late nineties. The plant could be seen from the high­way, and it was the size of a small city. At one time, all its smoke­stacks must’ve been going and life must have been burst­ing out of all its sub­struc­tures and out­build­ings. But when I saw it, it looked like some­thing out of a Bat­man movie — Gothic, men­ac­ing and des­o­late — a 20th cen­tury ghost town.

    That’s the feel­ing I get when I look at this col­lec­tion of pho­tos. Are they sad? Do they only tell us of our bro­ken dreams and folly? No. Strangely, there is a sort of grandeur still on dis­play. But dif­fer­ent, less vis­i­ble to the naked eye. No doubt Detroit would pre­fer to be bustling with indus­try again. Who knows if they will ever recover, and the loss of so many people’s liveli­hood is unques­tion­ably tragic.

    But the pho­tog­ra­phers rec­og­nized that decay can have a haunt­ing kind of life to it. There’s some­thing that stirs your spirit when you see the places where we used to be busy. We don’t suc­ceed in build­ing eter­nal palaces and edi­fices, but that’s not to say that it’s all for noth­ing. There’s a touch of our human­ity at work in it still.


    Related posts:

    1. Bick­er­ing at Bethlehem

    March 16th, 2009 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 03.16.2009

    Wow. Just… wow.

  • Mimi

    Beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing photographs.

  • Grace

    I agree. I don’t know if there are plans to exhibit them some­where (prob­a­bly there are). I’d love to see them in person.

  • Jamie King

    These pic­tures are amaz­ing. Some of these build­ings are so intri­cate in detail and while these images ren­der a haunt­ing appear­ance of build­ings in ruin…just imag­ine what they were like years ago. It’s a shame they are all sit­ting there unused and aban­doned. All of that archi­tec­tural beauty and noth­ing left but silence. http://www.sal-thehaunting.com

  • Anam Cara

    It all just makes me sad.….

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required