This article from The Observer chronicles the quest by two French photojournalists to explore a real post-apocalyptic landscape in this era where we as a society constantly dramatize the fake apocalypses and blame them on Zombies.

Of course, here the ruin of an entire city and way of life was not caused by the Differently Animated (when is it ever?) but by economic decline and political abandonment:

In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city’s painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America

…

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.”

The pictures, some of which you can see in the Observer’s online gallery, are devastating and eerie.

Yet, you know what you don’t see in any of these pictures? Zombies. Why is that? Because Zombies didn’t destroy this particular slice of American society. Contrary to the assertions of your Romeros and your Russos and your Boyles and Snyders, the real threats that can leave our sophisticated modern society a vacant, haunted shell of its former self aren’t the Differently Animated, they’re things like racial tension, trade deficits and shifting technologies and workforces.

But that’s not the story you get in the American press, which prefers to focus on demonizing Zombies and raving about The Walking Dead, rather than looking hard into the mirror and exploring the stark beauty of a real post-apocalypse in Detroit for its deeper meaning.

Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.