The beginning of the 19th century brought many economic, social and cultural changes to the city of Detroit that decisively marked the future of the city. These capitalistically oriented changes along with the promise of personal progress brought on by Fordism, was followed by extensive industrialization, urbanization and overall prosperity. As a result of globalization and the city’s inability to adapt an aging industrial sector in the wake of the United States transitioning from a manufacturing to service economy, the city fell into decline after WWII, falling prey to deindustrialization and deurbanization, bringing severe negative consequences for the economic, social and cultural well-being of the city. At the turn of the millennium, industrialization and sudden social changes brought on a kind of nostalgia for modernity and gave birth to Urbex, a new way of documenting and understanding material manifestations of modernity through photography. The deterioration of the once fastest growing city in the US is also documented by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, whose photographic project “The Ruins of Detroit” will be used to analyze the question of narrative ambivalence induced by the interpretation of photographs of the city’s ruins.
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