de zeen - Philip Jarmain Captures Detroit's Abandoned and Demolished Art Deco Buildings

Canadian photographer Philip Jarmain has documented the early 20th-century buildings of Detroit that put the city on "par with New York, Chicago and Paris".

Jarmain started photographing the vacant public buildings in 2010 when their fate remained uncertain, due to a decline in Detroit's economy after the 2008 crash.

"At that time really significant pre-depression buildings were being destroyed at an unprecedented rate," Jarmain said. "They were falling victim to demolition, arson, or scrapping."

"It became apparent that they needed to be carefully documented before they were destroyed – there was some urgency to document these structures," he added. "Many have since been demolished or burned or collapsed."

Many of the structures were completed at the turn of the 20th century in the decorative art deco and neoclassical styles, including St Agnes Church, Eastown Theatre and Lee Plaza Hotel. They represent an era of opulence in the city before the Great Depression in the 1930s.

"Detroit was known as 'The Paris of the Midwest' and its architecture was on par with New York, Chicago, and Paris," the photographer said. "It must have been so striking in the early 1900s."

The photographer travelled to the city 14 times in the years following 2010 to gather a portfolio of 58 shots that he first presented in San Francisco 2013 to coincide with Detroit’s declaration of bankruptcy.

My mother's side of the family is from Detroit. After the economic crash of 2008, Detroit was hit really hard and I was concerned. In 2010 I traveled to Detroit to check on the condition of the city for myself. At that time really significant pre-depression buildings were being destroyed at an unprecedented rate. They were falling victim to demolition, arson, or scrapping.

Studying the architecture of a city is a fascinating way to learn the history of a city

It became apparent that they needed to be carefully documented before they were destroyed – there was some urgency to document these structures. I then did about 14 trips to Detroit over a number of years to photograph buildings that I felt were significant. Many have since been demolished or burned or collapsed.

Studying the architecture of a city is a fascinating way to learn the history of a city: "architecture is the printing-press of all ages, and gives a history of the state of the society in which it was erected". I was embraced by Detroit locals who took me to every important building in this wounded but incredible city.

Sean Doerr, a local historian was 21 years old when I first met him. He had been passionately researching and documenting these structures since he was 13 years old and published his first book at age 17. Sean taught me so much about the architecture and the history of this city. He also helped with the research for this book American Beauty. I learned that there were some really passionate residents of the City of Detroit that felt that it was really important to share Detroit's story.

Detroit's architecture was on par with New York, Chicago and Paris

Detroit was known as "The Paris of the Midwest" and its architecture was on par with New York, Chicago, and Paris. It must have been so striking in the early 1900s. A city responsible for so much of the innovation in the 20th century. You also learned about the impacts of racism and "The white flight". The race riots in the late 1960s that the city perhaps never recovered from. Globalisation caused the closure of so many legendary factories.

However, Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013 and a friend bought a few houses at that time for $2000 dollars each. But after this bankruptcy, you saw Detroit "rise from the ashes". Young entrepreneurs starting innovative small businesses that would bring new life to these old buildings.

Incredible new bars and restaurants that had real character and were genuinely unique and of great quality. And some of the pre-depression architecture was finally starting to be restored after being vacant for decades.

I'm sure Covid 19 is affecting Detroit in a bad way currently but this is a hearty crowd of entrepreneurs – a resilient bunch.

Michigan Theatre is completely surreal

I have a number of favourite buildings but I will mention one in particular since it is completely accessible, so if you're visiting Detroit try to go and see it. It's Michigan Theatre, and you may recognise this interior because it was featured in the Eminem film 8 Mile. A massive opulent theatre from the early 1900s in downtown Detroit that was gutted and a three-level concrete parking garage was erected in the middle of the abandoned theatre. The original ornate ceiling is still intact directly above the car park. It is completely surreal.

At times you felt concerned for your safety and for your camera equipment. Crime was very high and you would hear gunshots now and then. We never traveled alone and even sometimes would let police know when we were venturing into particularly dangerous areas. I think it has definitely improved and the downtown feels totally safe.

Joe Biden was Vice President he was visiting Detroit in 2012 for a conference, while I was also in the city, and he was staying at the Westin Book Cadillac hotel. The story goes that while his truck of security equipment was stolen from the hotel's parking lot.

It was important to me that the photographs have incredible clarity and detail

Detroit has come a long way since then I think it is a really outstanding city to visit for food and drink and the arts. Keep in mind the DIA, Detroit Institute of Arts, is in this city and has one of the most impressive art collections in the United States including the incredible Diego Rivera Murals.

This project was originally intended strictly for a fine art exhibition which opened in San Francisco in the summer of 2013 the same summer that Detroit declared bankruptcy. So it was important to me that the photographs could be printed very large – 60 inches by 80 inches – yet still have incredible clarity and detail so that you could see the intricacy of the hand-painted plaster ceilings in these interiors or the ornate facades of these structures.

I used a Cambo technical camera with a Phase One Digital Back and Schneider Lenses. To this day these are still the highest quality digital cameras for architectural work. The camera allows you to correct the perspective "in camera" so that lines remain parallel and you don't get convergence. And the digital backs are very high resolution; 100 megapixels but you can also slide the sensor mechanically so that you can stitch images together for massive files of up to say 200 or 300 megapixels. The prints hold up very well at large sizes and look incredible in this new book. Great detail but not overly sharpened like some digital files.

When things calm down I highly recommend visiting Detroit if you are a photographer or if you simply love architecture and history. It is a wonderful city and the people really of Detroit really are wonderful hosts. It's a city that I am very fond of.

San Francisco Chronicle - Review by Art Critic Kenneth Baker - Philip Jarmain extracts beauty from grains of decay

Disasters - social and ecological, gradual or headlong - spell photographic opportunity. We who find this a little distasteful have to bear in mind that photography has contributed in myriad ways to the world whose suffering it witnesses. 

Just consider the splendid pictures of ruined pre-Depression architecture in Detroit that Canadian photographer Philip Jarmain shows at Meridian.

Then recall Robert Polidori's pictures of mildewed grandeur in Havana and of Chernobyl's "exclusion zone," or Richard Misrach's pictures of Louisiana's Cancer Alley, seen this summer at Stanford.

Hurricane Katrina inspired a small shelf full of monographs by photographers renowned and little-known, some plaintive, some outraged, some possibly exploitative. Further back in time, World War I attuned European camera workers of the 1920s to the surrealism stalking peacetime in the modern age.

Jarmain's images have both formal and topical power. As records of abandonment they resemble, too closely for comfort at times, the work of Bay Area photographer Katherine Westerhout, who is known for her pictures of ruined interiors. 

Jarmain's pictures owe some of their formal impact to Detroit's scabrous physical ruins: the camera, a disembodied eye, can extract beauties from the textures of decay. His work gets some of its topical edge from Detroit's recent declaration of hopeless insolvency. 

Many critical observers identify the Motor City's breakdown with the functional bankruptcy of industrialism and the moral bankruptcy of finance capitalism. But not even a long photo essay could substitute for the social analysis that this calamity demands.

Jarmain's pictures hit like dispiriting blows against which even denial and victim-blaming serve as pitiable defenses. They leave us wondering whether to feel sorry for others or for ourselves, which at best might blur the lines of moral exclusion we like to draw.

In some pictures, such as "The Lee Plaza Ballroom, Architect: Charles Noble, 1929" (2011), nothing looks fresher than the graffiti.

Seldom do we see a hint of redemptive salvage or reuse. The interior of "Michigan Theatre, Architects: Rapp and Rapp, 1926" (2013) has a basketball hoop with intact net toward one corner, the sole sign of life in its vast space. The ornately decorated remains of the theater's ceiling vaults loom overhead like a lurid hallucination within the building's stark brick shell.

Jarmain's pictures - at least in the present selection - seem now to tilt toward indictment, now toward elegy, finally settling into the probity of documentary.

That ambivalence - if ambivalence is the word - suits viewers' uncertainty as to the pleasure they ought to take in these images of loss and defeat. The exhibition title "American Beauty" contains at least a hint of reproachful sarcasm.

Geary in gear: Bay Area painter Linda Geary dominates a small double show that she arranged at Steven Wolf Fine Arts.

She has the front room to herself. It contains three big abstractions so satisfying in their companionship and the individual authority of their unseductive palettes, that I wanted to stop there.

Influences from all directions seem to haunt Geary's new pieces - Mary Heilmann, for example, distantly maybe even Hans Hofmann - but their roots in her own creative history go deep. 

In their apparent indifference to our liking, Geary's paintings hang free as flags.

The second room assembles very different works by Lecia Dole-Recio, Jeffrey Gibson, Mary Weatherford and Wendy White, none local, all unknown to me before. Small though it is, the show achieved its purpose in that it makes me want to see more.

Cogan less real, still true: The recent paintings of San Franciscan Kim Cogan at Hespe seem to show him edging toward abstraction.

Light - especially the ways the cityscape can register it - has long been his focus. Recently, and in certain pictures here, he has added the challenge of depicting oceanside vapors and the metallic ring that they lend appearances.

But in pictures such as "Lighthouse" (2013), "House by the Lake" (2013) and "Under a Pier" (2012), he sacrifices descriptive detail to the abstract qualities of structures' geometry and of his pictures' overall surface design. 

"Fleishhacker Pool Ruins" (2013) may be the most abstract work by him that I have seen so far, despite its emotional key of mourning for a recently demolished San Francisco landmark.

Philip Jarmain: American Beauty: Photographs. Through Oct. 20. Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell St., S.F. (415) 398-7229. www.meridiangallery.org.

Design Boom - philip jarmain documents detroit's architectural past

canadian photographer philip jarmain presents ‘american beauty’, a series of images that document the rapid destruction of detroitʼs early twentieth-century architecture. the haunting captures depict abandoned, forgotten spaces of a bygone era, cataloging the ingenuity and innovation of the american city that has since spiraled downward.  the interiors and exteriors of monumental public buildings are tired and worn, some deteriorated beyond recognition. opulent architectural structures like theaters and hotels, which once beautified detroit streets, are currently being destroyed at an exponential rate. the collection of photographs emphasize the form and detail of the buildings themselves, archiving a forgotten era and the lost art of significant architects. ‘these are the last large format architectural photographs for many of these structures.’, says jarmain.

Daily Mail UK - The decline of Detroit: How the architectural jewels in motor city's crown have fallen into disrepair and are now being demolished

What does a bankrupt city look like? Haunting, tragic and strangely beautiful, according to Philip Jarmain's incredible images of Detroit - the once burgeoning, now desolate Michigan capital.

The Canadian photographer's brilliant series 'American beauty' captures the rapid destruction of Detroit's early twentieth-century architecture. 

He depicts abandoned and forgotten spaces of a bygone era defined by ingenuity and innovation. But, inside and out, these monumental public buildings now stand tired and worn, some barely recognizable as their former selves. 

Many of the structures, whether theaters, hotels or even police stations and public schools, are being torn down as the city continues its demise. But Jarmain managed to capture the impressive works in their final state before their architects' masterpieces are lost forever.

'These are the last large format architectural photographs for many of these structures,'Jarmain explains.

They are part of American Beauty: The Opulent Pre-Depression Architecture of Detroit at San Francisco's Meridian Gallery at 535 Powell street. The exhibit runs till October 20 and is curated by Sheeka Arbuthnot. 

WOZ - EINE REISE IN DEN USA Wem gehört Detroit?

Casa Vogue - A ruina de Detroit, em fotos impressionantes

Quando Detroit se declarou incapaz de pagar dívidas superiores a US$ 20 bilhões e pediu concordata no último mês de julho, muita gente se disse chocada com a ruína daquela que já foi a quarta maior cidade dos Estados Unidos. Para o fotógrafo canadense Philip Jarmain, no entanto, não houve surpresa. Tocado pela triste situação do antigo polo industrial americano, o profissional começara em 2010 a registrar aquilo de pior que via na metrópole.

O impacto de Detroit na definição de uma estética industrial e moderna não tem precedente. A cidade, que por um longo período se definiu pela inovação e pelo trabalho artesanal empregado em seus edifícios, chegou a ser apelidada de “Paris do meio-oeste”. A arquitetura erguida ali no início do século 20 não devia nada à de metrópoles como Nova York, Chicago, ou a própria Paris.

A crise de 1929 pode ter freado a era da opulência arquitetônica, mas Detroit manteve-se forte até, pelo menos, os anos 1950, berço que era de uma das indústrias mais importantes do país, a automotiva. Com a mudança sistemática de parte de sua população para os subúrbios a partir da mesma década (fenômeno ocorrido em quase todos os EUA), as crises do petróleo nos anos 1970, a chegada dos carros japoneses nos anos 1980, e por fim a dura recessão econômica que abateu-se sobre o país em 2008, Detroit sucumbiu.

Este último ato da derrocada foi o golpe de misericórdia – a cidade ficou em ruínas. A população caiu de 1,8 milhão de pessoas na década de 1950 para 706 mil atualmente; a taxa de desemprego chega, hoje, aos 30%; 40% da iluminação urbana não funciona e metade dos parques está fechada. Quanto aos majestosos prédios antigos? Se não foram demolidos, são constantemente degradados.

Neste momomento, 20 das inúmeras imagens feitas por Jarmain compõem a mostra American Beauty – The Opulent Pre-Depression Architecture of Detroit, que ocupa dois andares da Meridian Gallery, em São Francisco, na Califórnia. Impressas nos tamanhos 1,2 x 1,8 m e 1,5 x 2,1 m, as películas impressionam pela magnitude. A riqueza de detalhes é assustadora, uma vez que o que se vê ali não é beleza, mas destruição, descaso e abandono. “Estas são, provavelmente, as últimas fotos arquitetônicas de formato grande que contemplarão tais estruturas”, lamenta o fotógrafo.

Talvez sejam. Mas para ter certeza é preciso conferir o tamanho das imagens apresentadas numa outra mostra sobre a cidade, essa aqui em São Paulo. Detroit: ponto morto? ocupa o Centro Cultural São Paulo a partir deste sábado, como parte do roteiro da X Bienal de Arquitetura da cidade. Para saber mais a dica é conferir os posts feitos na página do evento, no Facebook.

Wired Magazine - Can Detroit's Architectural Past Inspire it to Claw Back to Greatness

It often happens that news events create a new context for existing photo projects, and such is the case with Philip Jarmain’s photos of Detroit in light of the city's recent filing for bankruptcy. Jarmain's series American Beauty documents architecture from a pre-Depression era Detroit – a time when the city was on the rise. They now stand in contrast to its current rock-bottom economic straits.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of photographers have flocked to Detroit during the city's long slide, documenting its demise and creating an entire category of "ruin porn." But Jarmain sees his work as optimistic and uplifting. Whether his photos stand as a goodbye to a glory forever passed or an inspiration for what the city could be again, is a matter of perspective.

“What I’m trying to do is document these buildings carefully and with craft,” Jarmain says. “The buildings are part of a history filled with ingenuity, innovation and entrepreneurship. They’re part of a record that is about brilliant minds coming together to create the capitalist frontier and the middle class of America.”

Jarmian is Canadian, but he has strong ties to Detroit. His great grandfather played for the Detroit Symphony, his grandfather was an architect in the city and his uncle was the head of PR for Ford.

“I never really spent any time there growing up but I’ve realized that I have a stronger connection to the city than I thought,” he says.

Jarmain started the project in 2010 and during the past three years has traveled to Detroit from his home in Vancouver nine times to make pictures and collaborate with locals, such as Sean Doerr, concerned about preserving Detroit’s rich architectural legacy.

Written by Jakob Schiller

Winner - Lurzers Archive Top 200 Photographers World Wide

Philip Jarmain’s series American Beauty was published in the prestigious Lurzers Archive Top 200 Photographers World Wide.