Thomas J. Sugrue

Robert Polidori

Yves Marchand

Romain Meffre

Until the 1960s, Detroit was one of America's most important cities, a hub of industry with a population of almost two million and a skyline to rival that of any U.S. city. Its buildings were monuments to its success and vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, those same monuments are now ruins: the United Artists Theater, the Whitney Building, the Farwell Building and the once ravishing Michigan Central Station (unused since 1988) today look as if a bomb had dropped on Motor City, leaving behind the ruins of a once great civilization. In a series of weekly photographic bulletins for Time magazine called "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline," photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been revealing to an astonished America the scale of decay in Detroit. "The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires," write Marchand and Meffre. "Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state." As Detroit's white middle class continues to abandon the city center for its dispersed suburbs, and its downtown high-rises empty out, these astounding images, which convey both the imperious grandeur of the city's architecture and its genuinely shocking decline, preserve a moment that warns us all of the transience of great epochs.

The Ruins of Detroit

The crumbling grandeur of Budapest, in luscious photographs from the duo behind The Ruins of Detroit Between 2014 and 2016, French photographers Yves Marchand (born 1981) and Romain Meffre (born 1987) visited 400 of the more than 4,000 internal courtyards in Budapest. Their large number and variety of styles incorporating different facets of classicism and modernity make them a remarkable architectural phenomenon--a charming second city within the city. Marchand and Meffre systematically documented these courtyards, producing a typological series that describes this particular form of collective housing and reflects the city's tumultuous history, its changing political regimes and economy. Budapest Courtyards allows us to delight in the crumbling grandeur of the courtyards, and observe the developments and personal strategies of adaptation which they evidence. "In line with their work on Detroit and Gunkanjima Island, Marchand and Meffre have managed to navigate two extremes at the intimate heart of the Hungarian capital to best superimpose the Budapests of today and the last century, producing an extensive series that offers an untarnished view of this unique heritage." --Hélène Bienvenu

Romain Meffre

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