Tim Tower of the WSWS recently spoke to photographer Andrew Moore, whose Detroit Disassembled reveals the devastation of the city as “a multi-facetted metaphor of America.”
(Slideshow at link)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/detr-j05.shtmlhttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/01/andrew-moore-detroit-disassembled.htmlTT:
Let me ask you about the term “right-sizing” as it applies to Detroit. I remember a discussion with some architects and students about designing for New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In one case a student had been encouraged to approach the problem of the destruction of the city as if it were no more serious than the stretching of a rubber band, or the expansion and contraction of a ball of rubber bands. However, the situation in that city is not a game. The lives of tens of thousands of people were at stake.
The same is true in Detroit. As you say, it is a symbol of our country, our entire social system. When the mayor talks about “right-sizing,” he approaches the population with a crass brutality which is being deliberately obscured by that term. What they are proposing …
AM:
...cutting off city services and forcing people to move. And it’s always about moving poor people, and generally, poor, black people. Those are the only people who get moved. Maybe some judge will say it’s constitutional to cut off people’s water and gas and force them to move. I don’t know. I think it is very coercive—an extreme measure. It may be efficient, but I don’t know if it’s ethical or legal.
TT:
There is a war going on in America. It is being fought by one side. And the other side…
AM:
...hasn’t even gotten to the battlefield.
TT:
Yes. Your book plays a role in that. It is a wake-up call.
AM:
Most people in America have no idea what Detroit looks like. Even people who live in the suburbs of Detroit might say, ‘You just photographed the bad parts,’ or ‘We only lock our car doors when we go downtown.’
When you really get into what is there, the hospitals and the schools and the libraries and the waste and the corruption, it’s hard to take—the waste in particular.
The most disturbing part of photographing Detroit was certainly the schools—not just Cass Tech, which was the flagship of corruption and waste. But in so many of these elementary schools and middle schools, the books and the computers were just left.
I had a hard time. Even making pictures in those spaces was hard.
TT:
We talk to teachers all the time. There is a carve-up taking place. This is the model for education in America. They are down-sizing, “right-sizing,” the school system with a meat cleaver.
AM:
To literally build a new Cass Tech next to the old one and not even move a test tube 500 feet to the new building—I don’t understand that.
There is a beautiful print shop with lead type and a photography lab—all just left there. That I don’t understand. Every school that we went into was the same story. Things just left. It was mind-boggling.TT:
The school book depository by the train station…
AM:
It was originally the postal warehouse, which makes sense because the trains would come in with all the mail and the packages, and then there was an underground conveyor belt between the train station and that warehouse. They brought all the mail there. When the post office gave it up sometime in the 1960s, the public school system took it over and made it into their warehouse. There are books, report cards, art paper, toys, crayons, everything that you would need to run a school. Mountains of it.
TT:
Today teachers in the public schools in Detroit—you may not be aware of this—regularly purchase paper, pencils, crayons so that their students will have something to write with; and they are frequently the ones who are blamed, and even fired, when students who are suffering in terrible conditions do not perform well in mandated tests.
AM:
I don’t understand a system that breeds so much wastefulness. I am a registered Democrat. But after this work in Detroit, I am disgusted by the corruption of our system. I have never felt more despairing of political solutions. I am disappointed in Obama. I feel that the left is totally scattered and needs to be energized and even radicalized. It’s all rigged for the rich, the tax structure, everything.http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/inte-j05.shtml
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