There are several photographers who provide fascinating records of industrial complexes, buildings and cities falling into decay, creating modern ruins as nature takes over, such as Daanoe (Daan Oude Elferink) and forgotten heritage photographer Matt Emmett.  Will the buildings they have photographed disappear like the Mayan ruins into the jungle? Detroit is a favourite, perhaps because its demise from one of the most prosperous cities in the US has been so sudden and so symbolic – if it can happen to what was the fourth largest city in the USA, it can happen anywhere.

The two French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been working together since 2002 recording ruins and changing urban landscapes.  In 2005, they started a five year project in Detroit, a city which in the span of just one century has seen its growth and its decline.  It was only in 1913 that Henry Ford perfected the first large-scale automobile assembly line which was the essence of Detroit, which became the world capital of the car and twentieth century mass-production growing to a population of almost 2 million in the 1950’s and becoming the fourth largest city in the United States.   Relocation of the assembly plants outside the city, increased automation, competition from abroad and social tensions resulted in the demise of the city. “Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it……..Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.”

Their second project which again records a community that has risen and fallen in less than a century is Gunkanjima or “Battleship Island”, the nickname for the island of Hashima, located in the South China Sea off the southwest coast of Nagasaki.  In 1890 the Mitsubishi Corporation opened a coal and created one of the most remarkable twentieth century mining towns, which became the most densely populated place in the world with over 5,000 inhabitants in the 1950s. Its nickname derived from the silhouette of the concrete seawall which gave the island the appearance of a battleship.  With the decline of the coal industry, the mine closed in 1974, the inhabitants left and the city became a twentieth century ghost town.

“Gunkanjima thus seems to be the ultimate expression of the relation between architecture, culture of labor and the principle of industrial modernity, which aims not only at innovation and growth, but also at the abandonment of any obsolete form of activity.”

Marchand and Meffre’s work provides a fascinating record of our fast-changing urban landscape.

“Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies
and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time :
being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.

Photography appeared to us as a modest way
to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.”  (Marchand and Meffre)