In search of that special shot
Detroit is angry at photographers who relish its ugliness
Jesse Welter's tour begins at a wall in Detroit’s derelict industrial zone that is covered in graffiti. Climbing over rusting steel, rubble and broken glass, Welter enters the gloomy ground floor of Fisher Body Plant 21, an abandoned six-storey concrete colossus situated in the city’s northern outskirts where General Motors once made cars. Today, the building is derelict – and one of the most popular stops on Welter’s guided tour of urban ruins.
“Specialising in the beauty of Detroit’s historic and abandoned architecture” is how Welter describes his tour. It costs US$75 (Bt2,800) per person to accompany him to ruins of the once-proud Motor City. Its population is decreasing at a rapid rate and crime is rising along with Detroit’s mountain of debt. Welter guides groups through Detroit once or twice a week and there is always plenty of demand.
His tour is aimed at photographers looking for that special shot. The cityscape he covers is marked by decay, rusting girders, crumbling plaster and rotting furniture. Welter knows the most visually impressive spots in Detroit’s estimated 60,000 abandoned buildings. Anywhere else they might have been demolished.
Southwestern High School looks as if the teachers and pupils hastily evacuated it, leaving broken computers and torn textbooks in their wake. In one classroom, crayons and crusted paint boxes scatter the floor while in the music room, a broken piano still manages to produce a couple of off-key notes.
Photographers call the images produced here “ruin pornography”. But not everyone approves of glossy magazines revelling in the fall and decline of a once-proud city and documenting Detroit’s slow decay.
“The neighbours hate it. They wish it never happened,” says local photographer Dave Jordano. “People try to romanticise it.”
But in reality, he thinks, the photographers are only reinforcing Detroit’s image as a ghost town.
“That’s exactly the point,” says Welter in response to such criticism. “I didn’t create any of this. My job is just to come here, take photos and show people around.” He says he is just responding to market demand. “I show Detroit as it really is,” Welter says, who adds that visitors are safer in his company than if they roamed the streets alone.
“If you really wanted to highlight the situation in Detroit, you would focus on the people and not on its buildings,” says Jean Vortkaamp, a former mayoral candidate. “It’s about our home-town and how people portray it.”
Jordano believes Detroit is still far from a rebirth.
Billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert is investing money in the city, but mainly in just the small part that is predominantly white.
“The city will turn into a prairie,” he says. “The people will simply move away or die off.”
