The Year in Pictures 2009
Detroit Interior
A carpet covered with moss lines the floor of an office at a Ford plant in Highland Park, Mich. Photographer Andrew Moore explains, "This room is in a small office building on the grounds of the vast Highland Park Ford plant, which was built in 1910. In 1927 (Henry) Ford moved his auto production to his Dearborn plant, but Highland Park continued to be used as a storage facility. I took this picture in May as part of a project I began about two years ago. I decided to make a record of the decay of Detroit and the ways in which the city in some places is being "re-ruralized" —the works of man are being recycled by the forces of nature...The office you see here is a corner suite on the top floor. My assumption is that it had a wool carpet and that in the years after the last time anybody used that office— probably in the 1940s — the wool decayed and became a fecund ground for this moss. So the picture is really about the vitality of undisturbed nature."