A mural in East Detroit. Photograph © Danny Wilcox-Frazier.I pinched this photograph from a photo essay, entitled "Elegy for Detroit," at Mother Jones. (You can find yet another, equally bleak, collection of photos by the same photographer here, also at Mother Jones.) I missed it last fall when it appeared. But I have a sense of deja vu thinking about it. I posted here about a similar vision of the city a while back and what I said then applies in this instance as well. I won't repeat myself other than to say that Detroit, like, for instance, all of the cities across Western New York, is a third world country. And photographers seem to be treating such locations as such - sites of despair and hopelessness, nothing more. This conventional view seems to me not so much false as (for reasons I advance in my earlier post) very partial.
