Detroit imagined: intertextuality and the photobook as urban history

Wes Aelbrecht

Planning Perspectives, 2025, vol. 40, issue 4, 903-925

Abstract: This article revisits Detroit Images: Photographs of the Renaissance City (1989), a photobook that challenges the dominant dichotomy in ruin photography between decline and resilience narratives. While much scholarship on Detroit’s ruin photography focuses on aestheticized deindustrialization, this study argues that Detroit Images provides a critical alternative. It employs intertextuality, narrative sequencing, and juxtaposition to critique and reinterpret urban narratives, particularly through its portrayal of the Renaissance Center (RenCen). The RenCen emerges as a recurring symbol, embodying Detroit’s contested renaissance rhetoric and highlighting tensions between economic opportunism and public belonging. The article positions photobooks like Detroit Images as expanding traditional urban pictorial histories. These works function not only as records of urban change but also as critical visual commentaries on broader socio-political dynamics. By advancing the concept of ‘Intertextual Urban Photobooks’, this study explores how photobooks draw on urban planning, art, media, and cultural history to critique dominant narratives and reframe urban imaginaries. Through a detailed intertextual analysis, the article demonstrates how photography actively shapes and participates in cultural discourses. It highlights photobooks as tools for challenging dominant planning visions, fostering alternative urban imaginaries, and offering innovative methodologies for understanding the intersections of visual storytelling, urban politics, and redevelopment.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2024.2449333

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