"No Place Epitomises the Creative and Destructive Forces of Modernity More than Detroit"

"Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. 'It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,' says Marchand, 'Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world–or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.'"

Sean O'Hagan in The Observer discusses the new book The Ruins of Detroit.