Detroit is a city whose population has been consistently shrinking since the 1950s from the height of over two million people to currently less than 700,000. This has resulted in an estimated 90,000 abandoned buildings and homes. Detroit contains the largest collection of twentieth century ruins in the world. The scope of the abandonment has created areas in Detroit that have a ghost town quality. However, more often there is an architectural juxtapositioning of the abandoned and the occupied in close proximity. Despite the current renaissance that downtown Detroit is experiencing, there still remains a startling scope of abandoned structures that extend beyond the confines of downtown.
Detroit’s ruins are more than empty, neglected buildings. They symbolize human experiences within the community that have been forsaken, repressed and denied. They represent the unconscious history of the city. The ruins of Detroit are what Carl Jung referred to as the shadow, the disowned and unwanted parts of self that one is unconscious of and that are difficult to integrate into the whole of the individual. One could view these abandoned structures as physical representations of the collective shadow of metropolitan Detroit. Many of the things that metropolitan Detroit does not want to acknowledge about itself are alluded to within the existence of these structures.
Detroit is an industrial city. Its abandoned buildings represent the death of the Industrial Revolution, a revolution in which America dominated globally. These abandoned buildings are symbols of the city’s social and economic struggles, struggles that are often denied and repressed. Racism, poverty, the corruption of our political and economic systems, educational disparities between impoverished communities and affluent communities, are all themes that the larger society needs to repress in order to remain egocentrically comfortable. In a global sense, these ruins also represent the limitations of the American dream, the belief in endless potential, progress and prosperity. It is the illusion that things will always only get better that helps to protect society against anxiety and fear regarding the uncertainty of the future. These ruins challenge that illusion.
The philosopher Dylan Trigg describes a modern urban ruin as existing on the border between the living and the dead. It is both, yet fully neither. A ruin causes a disruption in time. It erodes the boundaries of past and present, creating a fluid circuitous motion within time, rather than a chronological, linear sequence. The unconscious human mind is similar. Sigmund Freud believed that the unconscious mind is transcendent of time, unaware of the distinction between past, present and future. This is in part how it becomes possible for the past to become so psychologically intermingled within the present and future lives of human beings. The unconscious mind does not know or adhere to time. Within the unconscious mind, events are circular, they get repeated. The ruin’s twofold existence within the world of the living and the dead can be a symbol of the twofold existence all human beings experience between our conscious and unconscious minds. We perpetually exist between two states: the living/what we are conscious of and the dead/ what is unconscious to us.
I am a psychologist and a photographer. I have spent a great deal of time photographing the ruins of Detroit and contemplating what they unconsciously represent. Ruins are interwoven into some of the deepest themes within humanity, such as the shortcomings of our political, economic and religious systems. Modern ruins epitomize the abandoned, unwanted, denied and repressed parts of us. They incarnate what we do not want to see, own or amend as a species. Ruins prophetically foreshadow the future and the inevitable entropy to which all living beings are subjected. Ultimately ruins are symbols of humanity’s greatest conflict, the anxiety we are faced with as a consequence of having conscious awareness of our own mortality. Now let us gaze upon the ruins and subsequently upon ourselves.