Photography by Danny Wilcox Frazier
In Detroit: An American Autopsy, Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie LeDuff returns to his native city, where his mother’s flower shop is firebombed in the pre-Halloween orgy of arson known as Devil’s Night; where his sister loses herself to the west side streets; where his brother, who once sold subprime mortgages, now works in a factory cleaning Chinese-manufactured screws so they can be repackaged as “May Be Made in United States.”
LeDuff on NPR’s “Fresh Air”: “Look, people go to Rome to stare at the ruin porn. [Detroit] is a very fascinating place to look at. It’s difficult to live in it, and basically you see the pain’s not over. It hurts because that factory is where my dad was working. That’s why it’s hard. … When they say ‘ruin porn’ they’re talking about empty, abandoned structures. My work has to do with living, breathing people and the difficult task of getting through this moment — which we will — and building a future. So no, I don’t look at it as ruin porn at all. This is a document of us getting ourselves back together.”
