"Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff"

Via Tomorrow Museum I found this article, written about photographers flocking to Detroit: "After suffering through the nation's worst and most concentrated examples of racial violence, industrial collapse, serial arson, crack war, and municipal bankruptcy following years of municipal kleptocracy, Detroit is being descended on by a plague of reporters. If you live on a block near one of the city's tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can't toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house."

It's a must read, here's an example why: "'Time magazine sent a 24-year-old guy to Detroit,' James Griffioen told me. 'They wouldn't let him rent a car, so he was dropped off in a cab downtown. He's there for six hours and he's supposed to write a feature article on Detroit. For Time. He had a meeting with the mayor in the morning, the mayor stood him up, then he had a meeting with me, and that was it. [...] you get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they're interested in shooting is ruin porn.'"

I suppose it now is really time for that big Detroit project where someone doesn't just shoot the ruins and abandoned book depositories.

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Conscientious has highlighted an article on Vice about the flood of journalists and photographers making the pilgramage to Dtroit to document the implosion of the city. The decline has been going on for a long time, but its the hot topic for media look... Read More

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This page contains a single entry by Joerg Colberg published on August 24, 2009 6:25 AM.

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