Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Finding Beauty in Decay

Here’s a strangely gorgeous photo essay by artist Lowell Boileau, who is apparently a growing name in the field of artistic urban ruins.

Boileau’s pictures highlight the ruins of Detroit. That city's name has been synonymous with “urban squalor” for longer than I’ve been alive, but until I saw Boileau’s work I had no idea just how far it had fallen.

Of course we’ve all seen plenty of ruins or at least pictures of them—Pompeii, the Acropolis, Angkor Wat—but Boileau's pictures show that such images are far more haunting when it’s pieces of your own culture and country crumbling into rubble.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tangentally:
Where London Stood is a website archiving the trope of Cities in Ruin:
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/Home

I myself stoked my love of Lost Cities with a little web-comic called Cities in Shadow:
http://www.baddaystudio.com/citiesinshadow.html

6:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not that I'm a dork or anything, but I waste my time photographing industrial ruins. I've been known to bring home "artifacts" for home decor.

One of my favorite websites for photos of ruins is here.

7:26 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

FREE hit counter and Internet traffic statistics from freestats.com