Vice Magazine is carrying a very interesting article about the way Detroit is being portrayed by the media in the midst of its economic catastrophe.

“Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters,” says writer Thomas Morton. “If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house.”

Accompanying the article is this photo, meant to illustrate photographers’ habit of literally cropping out prosperity from their shots.

Two interesting items in this month’s Harper’s Magazine:
End of the Road, a piece about how the decline of the Big Three is linked to declining blue-collar wages and job security, and
These Mean Streets, photos of “scenes from the abandoned city”
Neither is available online unless you are a subscriber, so you’ll have do it the old fashioned way and to pick up a magazine if you want to look at these.

On April 30th, 2009, one hundred St. Louisians stepped up to the line and threw their dart at the giant map of St. Louis City. They then had a month to visit the block where their dart landed and take a photograph.
The results are beautifully chronicled at dartstlouis.com.
A sampling:

Take a look at the photos of industrial decay highlighted by this blog.
There are an amazing amount of photos on here. My one teeny complaint is that I would like to know a little bit more about where some of the pictures were taken. It’s still well worth a look.
-KG

Wow. Check out this slideshow by two French photographers about decline in Detroit. Amazing.

Wow. Check out this slideshow by two French photographers about decline in Detroit. Amazing.