American Ruins: A Photo Essay
In our latest photo essay, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre travelled across America taking photos of abandoned buildings. Edward Carr finds an unlikely beauty in their dilapidation…
Abandoned buildings are in mourning. They grieve for the lives that their damp and empty rooms have left behind. In their prime, these monumental breakers, lead works and turbine halls presented a public face to the world. They were the arena where men and women toiled and enterprise ended in success or failure. Now they are shut away, left to mourn in silence.
The columns and pilasters of these immense buildings recall a more assertive past. In that foreign country, powered by coal and steam, the 20th century was young and dynamic. The future held an intoxicating vision of progress. Now the future has arrived and that promise has been left strewn across the tarmac, mingled with broken glass, rusting iron and the encroaching scrub of the woods.
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, the photographers who took these pictures (slideshow left), have built their professional lives on ruins. Both born in the 1980s, they started photographing derelict buildings in the outskirts of Paris, where they grew up. Since then they have shot America’s abandoned cinemas and its empty office blocks. At first each had his own camera; now they use just one. “Often”, Marchand says, “we cannot remember who took which shot.”
Marchand and Meffre tend to show their pictures in Europe but take them in America—especially Detroit, the metropolis created by the automobile in the first half of the last century. But, they point out, the car also sucked the life out of downtown Detroit, which has lost more than half its population since its zenith in the 1950s. The ensuing decay is the subject of their book, “The Ruins of Detroit” (2010).
In 2005 they began to take pictures of the rusting hulks of American industrial heritage, much of it, like these buildings, in the north-eastern states. They were drawn by the towering scale of what they found. “We felt like archaeologists in temples,” says Meffre. “Even though the buildings are not religious, they express a belief in the future and in the system. They are their cathedrals. They have a sort of naivety, a dream, an awareness of destiny that is a bit like religious belief.