Artists have been fascinated for centuries by the beauty of decay as revealed through architectural ruins. Think of the toppled classical buildings in the 17th-century paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the carcasses of Roman edifices in the 18th-century etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi or the deserted Gothic churches painted by Caspar David Friedrich in the 19th century.
To this venerable tradition now comes the New York-based photographer Andrew Moore, whose stunning, large-format photographs of urban decay in 21st-century Detroit are on view in a world-premiere exhibition at the Akron Art Museum.
Moore, 53, a native of Old Greenwich, Conn., has made a specialty out of documenting the architectural and environmental consequences of economic and social upheaval. He’s photographed urban decay in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rise of a desert metropolis in Abu Dhabi.
In Detroit, Moore revitalized the age-old tradition of portraying architectural and industrial ruins. He’s part of a wave of photographers working in the same vein, including Camilo Jose Vergara, also known for his images of Detroit; and Andrew Borowiec, whose photographs of the industrial Flats in Cleveland are on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Moore brings passion and visual eloquence to his task, along with a keen eye for the rich and complex textures of decay.
The shock is that he isn’t recording images of remote and ancient Rome, Greece or Persia, or the bombed-out cities of Nazi Germany or Japan after World War II. Instead, Moore’s work depicts the consequences of free-market capitalism and democratic self-government in a country with lots of land and a footloose population.
A city is built and then quickly discarded by a free people, as casually as one would crumple a soda can after draining it.
The story is painfully close to home, because it is, in part, Cleveland’s story. Detroit, like Cleveland, suffered huge losses in manufacturing after World War II, along with block-busting, white flight and redlining, followed by a wave of subprime lending and foreclosures.
If anything, Detroit’s decline has been more precipitous than Cleveland’s, because the city’s economy was so highly dependent on auto manufacturing. Detroit couldn’t adjust to automation and the onslaught of well-made Japanese and European cars, and it paid the price.
With roughly 850,000 residents, Detroit has lost a million inhabitants since its population peaked in 1950. According to the exhibition, a third of the city’s 138 square miles is vacant — an area roughly the size of Boston or San Francisco.
Moore found abandonment and decay everywhere.
Among the heartbreaking works on view in Akron are a pair of scenes of the long-abandoned Michigan Central Station, a Roman-scale edifice visible for miles on the outskirts of downtown Detroit.
Moore captured haunting images of snow drifting through the station’s main waiting room and of the building’s vast, neoclassical facade, pocked with hundreds of smashed windows. At the Engine Works of the Detroit Dry Dock Co. in the Rivertown neighborhood, Moore found a homeless person’s shelter stuffed into the corner of a vast factory floor. It’s a 21st-century equivalent of Piranesi’s scenes of 18th-century peasants squatting amid the gargantuan ruins of ancient Rome.
Along with suggestions of entropy and death, Moore’s photographs convey admiration for nature’s power to colonize and overwhelm the most grandiloquent of architectural statements.
A shroud of vines smothers a large abandoned house on Walden Street on Detroit’s East Side, photographed by Moore in the summer of 2008. At the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, a grove of birch trees grows from a huge, matted pile of discarded books heaped under a collapsed section of roof.
The playing fields around Cooper Elementary School, also on the city’s East Side, have reverted to a prairie landscape filled with wildflowers. Perhaps the saddest and most shocking pictures in the show are those of abandoned factories.
These enormous buildings, many designed by the great industrial architect Albert Kahn, are now lighted by shattered skylights and clerestories, framed by rusting columns and beams, and filled with trash.
In one particularly bizarre image, a huge section of the Packard Motor Car Co. plant has caved in and somehow has become buried in mounds of discarded tires. These and other photographs blend grandeur and despair, a reverence for the past with a sense of the hubris that accompanies the collapse of empires. Moore has a strong feel for large-scale vistas, and also for telling close-ups.
An image of an abandoned chemistry lab at the former Cass Technical High School, filled with broken drawers and shattered glassware, is an image of appalling waste. In the East Grand Boulevard Methodist Church, Moore photographed a balcony emblazoned with the painfully ironic words “And you shall say God did it.
Moore’s photographs are collected in “Detroit Disassembled,” a large-format catalog that accompanies the exhibition. But while the book encompasses scores of images, the show, with its terse and elegant focus on 30 carefully chosen photographs, has the greater power. Reproductions fail to capture the full impact of Moore’s big originals.
The images in the show, which was sponsored by Akron collectors Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell, and organized by Barbara Tannenbaum, the Akron museum’s director of curatorial affairs, are accompanied by superbly concise labels and explanatory texts. Based on extensive research by Tannenbaum, the writings chart the rise and fall of Detroit and illuminate the buildings and places Moore captured with his lens.
For example, an image of moldering carpets and rotting wood wall panels in the former Ford Motor Co. headquarters in Highland Park is accompanied by a label that states that “in these offices, modern manufacturing was created.”
A label accompanying a photograph of the enormous courtyard of the abandoned Cass school adds pathos by stating that the structure, built in the 19th century and modernized in the 1980s, was replaced by a new building in 2005-06 and left to rot.
Determined not to leave its audience in a state of depression, the exhibition includes a wall text that describes Detroit’s efforts to demolish vacant houses and to assemble land for new uses, including parks and farms. “There are some glimmers of hope,” the text states. The Moore exhibition is sad, wrenching and beautiful.
Without straying into politics, it’s an eloquent plea for new national policies aimed at helping places like Detroit and Cleveland survive and become more competitive. It also demonstrates the admirable vitality at the Akron Art Museum, which emerged in 2007 from an architecturally ambitious expansion and renovation designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au of Vienna, Austria, with its artistic mission sharply in focus.
With strong projects such as the Moore exhibition, the Akron museum is demonstrating a desire to animate its new galleries with shows that justify a significant community investment. It is, quite simply, a knockout.