“Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff”

 

General Photography

Via Tomorrow Museum I found this article, written about photographers flocking to Detroit: “After suffering through the nation’s worst and most concentrated examples of racial violence, industrial collapse, serial arson, crack war, and municipal bankruptcy following years of municipal kleptocracy, Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters. 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.”

It’s a must read, here’s an example why: “’Time magazine sent a 24-year-old guy to Detroit,’ James Griffioen told me. ‘They wouldn’t let him rent a car, so he was dropped off in a cab downtown. He’s there for six hours and he’s supposed to write a feature article on Detroit. For Time. He had a meeting with the mayor in the morning, the mayor stood him up, then he had a meeting with me, and that was it. […] you get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.’”

I suppose it now is really time for that big Detroit project where someone doesn’t just shoot the ruins and abandoned book depositories.