I had been in Detroit for four days and hadn’t spoken with anyone, I was going about my business, my task of recording what I was seeing. Walking through abandoned buildings surrounded by deserted neighborhoods. In factories, office buildings, schools, a dormant city housing complex, I was isolated and alone. You hear sounds and there is no one there. The city moves in slow-motion, it doesn’t matter much whether it is 9:00 A.M. or 4:00 P.M. The light changes, shadows shift and grow. I was a visitor from far away, my world is another world.

My trips to the buildings began to feel like that of a person who finds himself amidst the ruins of a lost civilization, no one left to tell the story but only witness the scribbling that communicated a massive broken codex in spray paint, pictogram symbols, urban hieroglyphics, some of the artists carried on as if nothing had happened, others noted deaths, obituaries in a few short words, no eulogy – “Kareena lived-died,” she was fifteen.  The indecipherable was also beautiful, like a scream on key – a few lines of poetry were scattered and painted throughout, the prosaic observer testifies that all this was not a complete act of madness. Animated characters drawn on a wall depict the violence of a society that seemed to have murdered itself, each one a suicide.

Schools opened and doors are splintered wood and off their hinges, all windows broken, glass scattered, books, new textbooks litter the hallways. Behind the school, through bent pipes and broken window frame I can see a brand new swing set and red slide, not a single inhabitable house beyond. As if they had “bugged out,” everyone got up and left and never returned.

A small pink Baptist church, its seats all stacked in the center of the floor, like the preparation for a bonfire, and the prayer books tucked away in the back of each pew. The ceiling had collapsed and a minister looking out from the altar would see the cruciform pattern of beams on the roof, the podium was laid out like a casket before a large window which still had a few pieces of green and orange glass remaining.

Each step my shoes hit broken glass, echoed into the long acoustics of a maze-like system of hallways, propped on one knee, looking for the right light in a room filled with empty bookcases, Dewey decimal ranges taped to each shelf. No sound at all, and then suddenly I hear footsteps all around me, running -blood cold, running towards me or away, can’t tell – the sound of movement intensified and then stopped, silent, still and waiting, looking at the door; there is no other way out, no shadows, no more echoes – nothing to see here.