Slowly collapsing towards 1:23 am will be a video with sound of the interior of the Michigan Theater in Detroit USA and a collection of photographs of the Chernobyl settlement in Ukraine. The images on these pages are only preparatory photographs for the final piece.

During the summer of 2006 I happened to visit both the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the city of Detroit within a few weeks of each other, thus forever linking them to one another in my mind. I have always been interested in abandoned places and the changes in fortune that precipitate their decline.

The day I visited the Chernobyl exclusion zone the radiation was unusually high and therefore my visit was cut short soon after these images of Pripyat were taken. Pripyat was the purpose built city that housed the workers and families of the four operational nuclear reactors that made up the Chernobyl nuclear power facility. It was Pripyat that I had come to see and Pripyat that is most photographed. However as we drove through the exclusion zone to exit I glimpsed through what I had originally thought only to be a forest bits of traditional Ukrainian houses and overgrown lanes. This was what was left of the original town of Chernobyl, a town that had existed as a settlement farming community for centuries before the reactors. The traditional Ukrainian rural architecture consists of a plain wooden house offset by ornately carved colorfully painted window frames. Glimpsing bits of these windows through the trees made them look like Hansel and Gretel houses and reminded me of how during Sleeping Beauty’s sleep the thorny trees and brambles grew up around and completely obscured the castle. Inside these houses are the objects of everyday life as well as the precious family heirlooms that one would take in case of fire but could never return for after a nuclear meltdown; perfectly preserved but for the disturbance of the elements or wild animals. It seemed to be a cautionary fairytale, a town that had fallen under a spell that could not be broken for the next few millennia.

Detroit’s decline did not happen in a matter of minutes, people did not flee in a matter of hours or days. Detroit’s decline like so many once vibrant American cities dependent on one industry was gradual: a combination of the decades long death throes of the American auto industry, white flight to the suburbs, poorly conceived revitalization plans and mismanagement.

Standing on the roof top of one of the few tall buildings left in downtown Detroit an associate of my fathers described Detroit as a smile missing most of its teeth. It was easy to see what he meant as one looked out upon vacant lot upon vacant lot where once the architecture of the auto industry had stretched skyward. Once architectural gems the buildings had been pulled down for public safety. My father pointed from our vantage point at the vacant lots describing the beaux arts buildings that once stood. Now there were islands of marooned twenty story vacant buildings surrounded by patches of weeds and dirt; the ghostly remnants of their former neighbors etched on the building’s side in bits of wallpaper and fireplace cavities.

The building we stood on featured one of the most evocative displays of the city’s decline as attached to it is the Michigan Theater. Once one of the grandest theaters in Detroit the Michigan Theater now serves as the parking garage for the office building next door. Its stage, seating and foyer gutted to make way for concrete parking ramps. The ornate suspended ceiling stripped back and sliced above the stage’s missing proscenium arch. As the building continues to decay its ornate plaster columns crumble to their concrete core. The building revealing its bone structure over time.