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, which stretch for miles, and collapsing giant

factories, human-made dinosaurs, often 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, thepleasure in 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 can 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 flaneur, the city stroller which is inseparable,

for us, from the modern city.