Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre (Abandoned Building Artist Research)

   Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have assembled an exquisite photographic collection of urban debris. Like modern-day archeologist, they have found a contemporary and abandoned ruin, of which they have the luxury to document the discarded remnants. The framing of their subject has strong aesthetic and graphic undertones, with careful attention to balance, movement, mass, line, and light. There is a generous mix of grand overviews, midrange “environmental portraits” and close up studies.
   The place depicted is the Midwest city of Detroit, a.k.a. “Motor City”, located in the Southeast corner of the state of Michigan. By far from being unique, it is actually one of many urban places in the United States where economic changes were better handled by just walking away. What is unique to Detroit is the central location of urban deterioration. How this urban ruin came about is beyond the scope of this review, but the Introduction by Thomas Sugrue rings true. I should know, I grew up in the Northern shadows of this once great city, but left in the early 1970’s as the great Detroit decline was just obtaining a strong foothold.
  Their photographs are created with a large format camera using an extensive depth of field, thus most of their subject matter is clearly seen, revealing a ponderous amount of details. Similar to the detached photographs of the New Topographics which was subsequently taken to the next level with the decaying and abandoned industrial facilities of Bernd and Hilla Becher, there is an aloof and distant feeling to these photographs, almost too cool and calculating in their documentary style. As with the photographers of New Topographics and the Becher’s, there is an absence of people in the photographs, as though they have vanished. To be fair, for most of the interior locations the photographers featured, no reasonable person would probably want to be there amidst the decay and destruction.

http://thephotobook.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/yves-marchand-romain-meffre-ruins-of-detroit/