Recently we stumbled across one such project, 100 Abandoned Houses, which photographer Kevin Bauman initiated in Detroit in the late 1990s. Many of the homes he photographed retain a faded grandeur even in their current shabby state, echoing a more prosperous age. Intending to create a visual archive of the slowly deteriorating homes in advance of their presupposed demolition, Bauman has returned time and again to find many of them still standing, forsaken by their owners and speculative developers both. In the years since his project took off (it received wide coverage in the press in 2009/10, including articles in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle), Bauman continues to document the ongoing demolition by neglect—albeit at a much slower pace as he has since moved out of the neighborhood—far surpassing the initial series of 100.
Despite a few compositional inconsistencies, Bauman’s project greatly exemplifies the productive affinity between typological analysis and the built environment, replete as it is with cultural signifiers and the trappings of social norms, power, and control that go into its construction and use. From the scale of urban plans and streetscapes to that of buildings both monumental and vernacular, on down to domestic interiors and architectural details, photo typologies are an effective way to explore, expose and elucidate power differentials and contradictions within existing socio-economic and cultural systems. On the surface Bauman’s archive certainly presents us with the all-too-familiar face of urban devastation in the wake of the mid-2000s subprime mortgage crisis, which compounded Detroit’s already accelerating economic decline.