ABSTRACT
Le Detroit (1999/2000), an installation project by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, comprises a six-minute-long, 35mm black-and-white continuous film loop and a collection of thirty-two large-scale color photographs. The photographs depict manicured lawns, brush-entangled fences, and dusty vacant lots, as well as decrepit buildings, some partially demolished yet, all clinging to some mystical remnant of lost grandeur. With these classically composed shots, their strangely beautiful blue skies and ethereal white clouds as imposing background, Douglas proposes a doubly haunting and surreal evocation of the social conditions that give rise to urban decay in modern cities like Detroit.
