The corrosion and decay paint vibrant colours across otherwise dull surfaces, lit only by natural sunlight spilling into rooms at unaccustomed angles. Each object left behind becomes more significant than it has ever been, hinting at the life prior to its disuse. Mouldy folders full of psychiatric evaluations hold clinical analyses regarding a patient's drawings in a dripping wet basement with no light. An opaque pair of square-rimmed glasses sit upon a dark grid at the power station control room. A dusty pile of papers hastily stapled together documents a tuberculosis patients life at the hospital, from admission, to death, to autopsy, to burial.
Floors collapse and walls cave in without care; if you get hurt, no one is here to help you. This is a lonesome alien world whose dark corners and peeling walls have gotten a hold of me and many others; this affinity for derelict structures and often dangerous excitement is the core essence of exploring that drives me to photograph these spaces.
Opacity - Abandoned Photography and Urban Exploration. 2012. Opacity - Abandoned Photography and Urban Exploration. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.opacity.us. [Accessed 18 March 2012].
AM: I feel that the project in Detroit is a culmination of my work. A lot of things came together for me there. I have always been interested in architecture and history. Even though I have shot in a lot of foreign countries, it was great to be photographing in America, in this point in time, at this point in history, and really dealing with the way things are in this country.
I am not really a documentary photographer. I am not trying to document decay, I am looking for places that are meaningful. One of the themes of the book is the recycling of man by nature. I did not show up in Detroit with that theme in mind. But it was something that struck me almost from the beginning. It is something that people will have to consider when it comes to right-sizing cities.
TT: In one passage you write, “My photographic interests have always lain at the busy intersections of history, particularly those locations where multiple tangents of time overlap and tangle. In other places I have photographed, such as Cuba and Russia, these meanderings of time create a densely layered, historical narrative. In Detroit, the forward motion of time appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse.” Are you referring to the destruction of these factories and the lives that were based on them?
AM: Detroit was a city that was assembled very quickly, and now it is unraveling at pretty much the same speed. “The busy intersections of history” refers to places like Russia where the czarist church was turned into a soap factory during the Soviet period, and now has been restored into a kind of youth center. That is the layering of history in the reuse of spaces.
By contrast, in Detroit, you don’t have the reuse of spaces. They are withering away, and what is replacing them is pheasants and trees and the growth of moss. In a way, man’s progress has been thrown in reverse; but nature’s progress is marching forward.
TT: Let me ask you about the term “right-sizing” as it applies to Detroit. I remember a discussion with some architects and students about designing for New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In one case a student had been encouraged to approach the problem of the destruction of the city as if it were no more serious than the stretching of a rubber band, or the expansion and contraction of a ball of rubber bands. However, the situation in that city is not a game. The lives of tens of thousands of people were at stake.
The same is true in Detroit. As you say, it is a symbol of our country, our entire social system. When the mayor talks about “right-sizing,” he approaches the population with a crass brutality which is being deliberately obscured by that term. What they are proposing …
AM: …cutting off city services and forcing people to move. And it’s always about moving poor people, and generally, poor, black people. Those are the only people who get moved. Maybe some judge will say it’s constitutional to cut off people’s water and gas and force them to move. I don’t know. I think it is very coercive—an extreme measure. It may be efficient, but I don’t know if it’s ethical or legal.
TT: There is a war going on in America. It is being fought by one side. And the other side…
AM: …hasn’t even gotten to the battlefield.
When you really get into what is there, the hospitals and the schools and the libraries and the waste and the corruption, it’s hard to take—the waste in particular.
The most disturbing part of photographing Detroit was certainly the schools—not just Cass Tech, which was the flagship of corruption and waste. But in so many of these elementary schools and middle schools, the books and the computers were just left.
I had a hard time. Even making pictures in those spaces was hard.
TT: The school book depository by the train station…
AM: It was originally the postal warehouse, which makes sense because the trains would come in with all the mail and the packages, and then there was an underground conveyor belt between the train station and that warehouse. They brought all the mail there. When the post office gave it up sometime in the 1960s, the public school system took it over and made it into their warehouse. There are books, report cards, art paper, toys, crayons, everything that you would need to run a school. Mountains of it.
TT: Return, if you would, to the way you got into the project. You were speaking to photographers in France, and they suggested coming to Detroit to photograph theaters.
AM: They were urban explorers. They said, “Come to Detroit.”
TT: You began as a photographer, but with an interest in history. You want to understand what you are photographing. You were not on a soapbox for a particular program; and yet, you were moved by this and repulsed by the system that created it.
AM: Yes, I agree with that. It’s a contradiction. This is a lifelong struggle for artists. Is it art for art’s sake, or is art supposed to improve social conditions? I think those are irreconcilable aims. But I feel that the collision of those two things makes very interesting work.
An interview with photographer Andrew Moore, author of Detroit Disassembled. 2012. An interview with photographer Andrew Moore, author of Detroit Disassembled. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/inte-j05.shtml. [Accessed 23 March 2012].
Pictures sourced from:-
Andrew Moore. 2012. Andrew Moore. [ONLINE] Available at: http://andrewlmoore.com/. [Accessed 23 March 2012].
She currently lives in Manchester working as a professional artist, and a Tutor in Manchester’s Universities.
Samuels Explores abandoned houses, schools, hospitals and asylums, and takes
with her a cast of costumed characters. Her team use the suggested narratives
found within the buildings to create disconnected, ethereal and often
unsettling images, that play with ideas of memory, story-telling and the
reclamation by nature of the man-made structures.
Samuels work also explores the issues around legality, and the public’s relationship with forbidden space. Entry into buildings often involves evading security and dogs, or being found and removed by the police, but once inside, these buildings become places for play or provide an opportunity to escape sociological rules. This can make spaces feral and unsafe, but can also give buildings that have been secured for decades back to the public.
In entering the buildings herself, creating narratives and documenting found objects and spaces, Samuels offers these spaces back to her audience, once again making them public and shared spaces.
With her Photographic Dioramas, Samuels painstakingly builds her images into three dimensions. In so doing, she creates a new environment, and invites her audience to explore it, as she has explored the original building
ANDREW MOORE
An interview with photographer Andrew Moore, author of Detroit Disassembled
By Tim Tower
5 January 2011
5 January 2011
I am not really a documentary photographer. I am not trying to document decay, I am looking for places that are meaningful. One of the themes of the book is the recycling of man by nature. I did not show up in Detroit with that theme in mind. But it was something that struck me almost from the beginning. It is something that people will have to consider when it comes to right-sizing cities.
TT: In one passage you write, “My photographic interests have always lain at the busy intersections of history, particularly those locations where multiple tangents of time overlap and tangle. In other places I have photographed, such as Cuba and Russia, these meanderings of time create a densely layered, historical narrative. In Detroit, the forward motion of time appears to have been thrown spectacularly into reverse.” Are you referring to the destruction of these factories and the lives that were based on them?
AM: Detroit was a city that was assembled very quickly, and now it is unraveling at pretty much the same speed. “The busy intersections of history” refers to places like Russia where the czarist church was turned into a soap factory during the Soviet period, and now has been restored into a kind of youth center. That is the layering of history in the reuse of spaces.
By contrast, in Detroit, you don’t have the reuse of spaces. They are withering away, and what is replacing them is pheasants and trees and the growth of moss. In a way, man’s progress has been thrown in reverse; but nature’s progress is marching forward.
TT: Let me ask you about the term “right-sizing” as it applies to Detroit. I remember a discussion with some architects and students about designing for New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In one case a student had been encouraged to approach the problem of the destruction of the city as if it were no more serious than the stretching of a rubber band, or the expansion and contraction of a ball of rubber bands. However, the situation in that city is not a game. The lives of tens of thousands of people were at stake.
The same is true in Detroit. As you say, it is a symbol of our country, our entire social system. When the mayor talks about “right-sizing,” he approaches the population with a crass brutality which is being deliberately obscured by that term. What they are proposing …
AM: …cutting off city services and forcing people to move. And it’s always about moving poor people, and generally, poor, black people. Those are the only people who get moved. Maybe some judge will say it’s constitutional to cut off people’s water and gas and force them to move. I don’t know. I think it is very coercive—an extreme measure. It may be efficient, but I don’t know if it’s ethical or legal.
TT: There is a war going on in America. It is being fought by one side. And the other side…
AM: …hasn’t even gotten to the battlefield.
When you really get into what is there, the hospitals and the schools and the libraries and the waste and the corruption, it’s hard to take—the waste in particular.
The most disturbing part of photographing Detroit was certainly the schools—not just Cass Tech, which was the flagship of corruption and waste. But in so many of these elementary schools and middle schools, the books and the computers were just left.
I had a hard time. Even making pictures in those spaces was hard.
TT: The school book depository by the train station…
AM: It was originally the postal warehouse, which makes sense because the trains would come in with all the mail and the packages, and then there was an underground conveyor belt between the train station and that warehouse. They brought all the mail there. When the post office gave it up sometime in the 1960s, the public school system took it over and made it into their warehouse. There are books, report cards, art paper, toys, crayons, everything that you would need to run a school. Mountains of it.
TT: Return, if you would, to the way you got into the project. You were speaking to photographers in France, and they suggested coming to Detroit to photograph theaters.
AM: They were urban explorers. They said, “Come to Detroit.”
TT: You began as a photographer, but with an interest in history. You want to understand what you are photographing. You were not on a soapbox for a particular program; and yet, you were moved by this and repulsed by the system that created it.
AM: Yes, I agree with that. It’s a contradiction. This is a lifelong struggle for artists. Is it art for art’s sake, or is art supposed to improve social conditions? I think those are irreconcilable aims. But I feel that the collision of those two things makes very interesting work.
An interview with photographer Andrew Moore, author of Detroit Disassembled. 2012. An interview with photographer Andrew Moore, author of Detroit Disassembled. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/inte-j05.shtml. [Accessed 23 March 2012].
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| Librarians Office |
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| Merman |
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| Detroit Time |
Andrew Moore. 2012. Andrew Moore. [ONLINE] Available at: http://andrewlmoore.com/. [Accessed 23 March 2012].
Jane
Samuels
Jane Samuels was born in 1979, Jane
has developed a love for the Arts, Politics, Teaching, and Animal and Human
Rights campaigning, and her name has been recognised for causing trouble in
each category.
She currently lives in Manchester working as a professional artist, and a Tutor in Manchester’s Universities.
Samuels
continues to develop work which challenges the boundaries of legality, and
public vs. private space. Samuels work is housed in several private
collections, and she continues to exhibit her work across the UK.
She
has even delved into Urban Exploring in one of her exhibitions which she
entitled:-
2008
“The Abandoned Buildings Project”
Earth; Manchester.
Solo exhibition; new images from the Abandoned Buildings Project.
Earth; Manchester.
Solo exhibition; new images from the Abandoned Buildings Project.
Samuels work also explores the issues around legality, and the public’s relationship with forbidden space. Entry into buildings often involves evading security and dogs, or being found and removed by the police, but once inside, these buildings become places for play or provide an opportunity to escape sociological rules. This can make spaces feral and unsafe, but can also give buildings that have been secured for decades back to the public.
In entering the buildings herself, creating narratives and documenting found objects and spaces, Samuels offers these spaces back to her audience, once again making them public and shared spaces.
With her Photographic Dioramas, Samuels painstakingly builds her images into three dimensions. In so doing, she creates a new environment, and invites her audience to explore it, as she has explored the original building
