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, the city stroller which is

inseparable, for us, from the modern city.