Scattered Documents, Disrupted Lives

This photo of the Highland Park Police Station, as featured in “The Ruins of Detroit,” is quite compelling.  As an Administration of Justice major, this image, in particular, caught my attention.  The idea of the police is to protect and serve no matter the situation.  When this particular suburb Detroit station was disbanded, the building sat empty.  It was broken into and looted.  The population in Detroit has been declining since the 1950s.  The scene depicted in this photo reminds me of the people of Detroit.  The scattered photographs that clutter the table and the papers strewn across the floor represent the disrupted lives of the citizens of Detroit.  To leave all of that important information behind, almost seems like a crime in itself.  These individuals’ identities and fingerprints were left for any looter to see or take.  To see a police station look like this makes me feel insecure and unprotected.  The abandonment of this building represents the abandoning of the city and the people of Detroit.  The overlapping of the photographs and documents create more depth in this photograph.  It makes the viewer want to see the individual items due to the obscuring of some of the objects. From the patterns of the tiles on the walls to the rigid filing cabinets, a place that should be well kept is in disarray. The pattern is broken by all of the scattered papers, the peeling paint, and the out of place cabinets and chair. This image fits perfectly into the photo essay of “The Ruins of Detroit.”  The collection of photographs in this photo essay display Detroit after abandonment.  The apartment buildings, the hotels, the schools, and the churches are all staples in “normal” communities.  For this community to have these important buildings in such bad conditions, makes me empathize with the people living there.  Their lives have been turned upside down and I could not imagine walking through a “ghost town” like the one Detroit has become.

Crime and Futility in Detroit

This picture was very striking to me.  As we know today crime is a serious problem in Detroit and what better way to capture the decline of Detroit than a picture of police department overwhelmed with photos of criminals.  It seems that only thing to increase while the city was deteriorating was crime and unemployment.  While the wealthy folk took advantage of their newly found mobility, those who weren’t so fortunate were the ones to stay and with a dying economy with a severe unemployment problem some were left without options turning to a life of crime to support their needs.

            From a more analytical aspect of the photo, it presents a number of appealing elements.  First of all, I interpret the image as a medium shot that informs the viewer of a certain aspect of the weakening city.  This aspect, which I touched upon in the first paragraph, is the overpowering amount of misconduct that has plaguing the city.  The photo exemplifies this idea by capturing forceful features to tell the story.  The numerous photographs strewn about the room are the most obvious of this, but are accompanied by chaotic drawers and filing cabinets with open doors, aged paint cracking off the doors, and even a phone off the hook.  These features bring about a sense of futility that the police must have been facing during this time.  This futility must have reached such a point where they had no choice but to desert their operations.

Additionally, the photographer further adds appeal to the image by their use of several compositional strategies.  The main strategies I observed were viewpoint, depth, framing, and balance.  The viewpoint of the image enhances the depth by providing a discernible foreground, middle ground, and background.  The viewpoint as chosen from behind the table allows the viewer’s eye to first be drawn to the array of photographs on the table but as the line of vision flows back into the middle ground the scattered documents and desks further the experience, but we are left at an abrupt end at the wall in the back of the room.  The closed nature of the walls combined with the framing, since the photographer chose to crop the rest of the room out, add to the sense of clutter enriching the futile and overwhelming nature in the photo.  Finally, although the photographer chose to crop out the right half of the room the image still possesses a composition of balance.  The door on the right with the paint cracking off balances out the commotion of the other elements that lay in the center and right side of the arrangement. 

            Overall, the photograph does a remarkable job of evoking emotion as well as telling a story without words.

Marchand, Meffre inspire hope in streets of Detroit

First and foremost, I would consider this image to be an establishing shot.  Being toward the very beginning of the sequence, it fits the basic criteria as such.  However, with an establishing shot comes a foundation for an idea or story that is being presented.  This is created in the actual context of the image.

The vantage point of looking out a window onto the city subliminally represents hope.  The old-looking crusty window frame and furnace which frame the photo contribute even more to this motif of hope by establishing that the “main character”, or the person who is looking out of the window, is having a tough time financially.

The actual window/window frame contributes to the photo in a structural sense as well.  The conscious decision by Marchand to include a little bit of the window frame and furnace in the foreground creates an effect of an actual person sitting inside their home and looking out the window.  The window itself is also a conscious decision to have an interesting aerial vantage point.  The aerial vantage point coupled with this humanizing effect created by Marchand gives me the feeling that this person is looking out onto his/her city and reflecting; thinking about where he/she or the city has come from, and where he/she would like them self and the city to go in the future.

Lastly, Marchand uses the street to his advantage.  The use of lines can manipulate the human eye and where our sight onto the image begins and ends.  At first, I am drawn to the ground of the photo just beyond the window frame.  I’m curious about the several dozen people I can see immediately.  I also look around the buildings and notice some graffiti.  Then I notice how all the people are walking down the street, so I follow them.  Eventually, I arrive at a slight glimpse of the sky line, some smoke presumably from a factory, and I can’t quite see where the sky line meets the ground.  For me, this even further contributes to the motif of hope.  Much like a story and time will continue to go on, so does the street.  It goes on to a point where I can hardly even decipher what it exactly is, but I know it exists.

 

 

 

Why, in the middle of an essay featuring abandoned rooms and factory floors, is there a photograph of a lone, dilapidated piano? Aesthetically, this image fits in with the rest of the gallery. It is cold, desolate and there is no attempt to appeal to a sense of nostalgia. There is a difference between this photograph and the rest of The Ruins of Detroit.  The majority of the pieces in the essay are of vast open spaces, abandoned auditoriums, vacant factory floors, or big abandoned buildings. Yet, this particular photograph is just one object with no contextual clues as to where the piano actually is. It is quite possible that the piano is in one of the abandoned music halls or empty schools, but for the purpose of the photograph, that context does not matter. This is a “detail” shot in the most traditional sense. The viewer can see the inner workings of the piano, the name of the manufacturer, the plaster from the walls and ceiling on the warped, discolored keys. The viewer truly feels like they can reach out and touch the object. The feeling the viewer gets is a direct result of the photographs composition.

The author communicates this feeling through a few techniques, including cropping, viewpoint, and leading lines. Our eyes are drawn down the piano frame, yet we can’t help but notice the wave in the keys. This creates an uneasy feeling for the viewer because intuitively we expect the keys to run parallel to the lines in the piano frame. At the same time, the key disfiguration takes the shape of a sine wave, which works in conjunction with the musical object. The leading lines work in conjunction with cropping and viewpoint to focus the attention solely on the piano. The author wants the viewer to focus solely on the piano, every key, every string, every mallet. Where the piano is does not matter, rather the object itself, not its location, demands undivided attention.

This leads back to the original question: Why, in the middle of an essay featuring abandoned rooms and factory floors, is there a photograph of a lone, dilapidated piano? Why does this particular object deserve this undivided attention? Because, the piano is just as representative of Detroit as the empty factories and buildings; music is in Detroit’s DNA as much as cars and factories. Like the city, this object was once beautiful and complex. The frayed cables and broken mallets of the piano are representative of the crumbling infrastructure of the Detroit. The city’s failing infrastructure makes residents face blackouts, uncontrollable fires and one of the slowest emergency response times in the United States.  The keys, like city services, are no longer responsive, and unable to complete their most basic functions.

Forest Fire

Roaring wind.  Crackling wood.  Searing heat.  Decaying life.

That is what I imagine a forest fire would be like.

Smoke swirling all around, a gray/black cloud obscuring everything.  CRACK!  A burning branch falls to the ground, sparks flying off and attaching themselves to ferns on the forest floor, eating away at the green life like parasites.

But at some point, the fire will stop.  And then… there are no words.  The site is smoldering.  A limb from a tree will still occasionally snap and fall; it had survived the initial blast of death, but it could not hope to endure the struggle afterwards in its weakened state.  Science says that fire causes chemical reactions; it changes the very essence of the objects it touches, sometimes making it barely recognizable.

But then, in the midst of smoldering embers and charred bark, in the midst of the death and decay, a little seedling pushes forth, its bright green leaves a stark contrast to the black hole it is born into.  It’s a sign of life and hope in the middle of a place as dead as the underworld.

That is what the picture above is: life in death, growth in decay.

Who would be viewing this photo essay?  A fairly large percentage of the audience have probably never been to Detroit.  I haven’t.  We know that Detroit is under a lot of strain due its economic downfall, but most of us probably don’t realize just how hard the city was hit. After seeing the photo essay before the picture above, one might be inclined to think that the city is nothing but ruins, that it is deserted, decaying, dead—as desolate and depressing as a forest after a fire.

But break the photo down.  Framed by the ruins of Detroit, two silhouettes walk down the road that leads the viewer’s gaze through the picture.  It’s the beginning of the conclusion, the first of two “closure” shots in the essay.  We saw picture after picture of ruins and decay, shots of the fallen empire, and then suddenly, we are confronted with people—a green seedling breathing new life into the ruins of a charred forest.

We also mainly saw photos focusing on only one building or one room, but now are taken back to a fuller perspective, reestablishing the city that the essay is depicting.  It’s like a second establishing shot, reminding us of where we had been transported before we leave the essay.  But the author also establishes something new, something that hasn’t appeared yet: life in the ruins.  Detroit might be fallen, burned almost beyond recognition by the economic disaster, its very essence changed.  But the city isn’t lifeless; people still live there, people that could rebuild the city and make it glorious again.

Take a look at the depth of the photo.  The road stretches and stretches, almost to the horizon.  It’s going towards the blue sky, yet another sign of hope and life.  And what about the viewpoint?  The aerial perspective almost makes me think of a pop-up map.  It’s not just a picture of a road; it’s a picture of the road to city’s future on the map Detroit’s life.  Just because the city is in ruins doesn’t mean it’s dead.  Quite the contrary, actually—Detroit is very alive!

Question: What is it about ruins that make a place seem dead?