I drove for several years through Detroit’s neighbourhoods, got out of my car (except

when, because of the cold, I set up my tripod on the street, lowered the window, and used

a remote control to take an image!), and tried to understand the city’s spirit of place,

which, I decided, lay in its endless horizontality, the vast expanse of reclaimed “prairies”,

abandoned blocks of houses and stores, and collapsing giant factories, human-made

dinosaurs often turned into makeshift dwellings for homeless people, interrupted only

by soaring churches and downtown skyscrapers, visible from so many points of the

urban setting. But downtown is a remote presence, a distant “shining city on the hill”

with its elusive promise of excess, wealth and glory.

My journey is also a journey of encounters with local residents. We shared the empty

streets, the lack of companions, the pleasure of communicating with another human

being. One day I will record in writing the surreal conversations I had with those who

lived through Detroit’s growth, decay and (partial) rebirth. Only a surrealist could have

survived so many decades of desertion. I loved them all.

Motown (Detroit’s nickname, taken from the Motown popular music label) thus became

a black and white modernist project, my view and experience of Detroit as a flaneuse,

thecity stroller which is inseparable, for us, from the modern city.