Belle Isle Aquarium
This exhibition presents the large format photographic work of Canadian photographer Philip Jarmain. Since 2010 Jarmain has been documenting the increasingly rapid destruction of Detroit’s early twentieth-century buildings. His emphasis in this work is on the architecture itself of these vanishing edifices: The form and the detail.
In Jarmain’s own words: “These are the last large format architectural photographs for many of these structures.” This is work of great visual impact, the scale and definition of the images translating for the viewer into space that one enters, a physical presence that one feels, and history that one contemplates. The majority of these majestic pre- buildings are presently being destroyed at an exponential rate as they lie victim to scrappers, arson, and demolition.
These photographs as an opportunity to consider the historical and current state of Detroit as an American city.
