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“It’s probably the greatest urban ruin in America,” photographer Andrew Moore speculated about Michigan Central, while discussing his photo “Waiting Room” with a group of photography students in the College’s Museum of Art.

The large color photograph depicts the ruins of what was once a grand classical structure with Doric columns and vaulted ceilings, now fallen into disrepair and littered with graffiti. Light falls through the arched window into the snow-dusted hall. “This is the United States, and it looks like ancient history,” Assistant Professor of Art Gary Green noted.

This is the sort of desolation that Moore has captured in his series “Detroit Disassembled,” of which seven prints are on display in the Museum. His photos capture the depression of the city, which was once prosperous and well-populated. But they also highlight a formal beauty to be found amidst the ruins.

His architect father instilled in him an appreciation for space, “not how structures contained space, but the way space was brought to life through structure,” Moore explained. While his photographs have much more to offer than architectural cataloguing, his respect for the structures compels him to represent them as faithfully as possible. “I like to keep the architectural lines as straight as possible so you don’t feel the distortion of the lens,” he said.

Moore’s fidelity helps him to create images that you feel you can almost step into. One can get lost in the large prints, made so sharp by his use of large-format cameras. This crisp detail is so engaging, particularly in an image like “Rolling Hall, Ford Motor Company, River Rouge Complex, Dearborn,” which draws viewers down the factory hall, a massive and complex structure filled with interlocking lines and crevices.

This same image, so true to the structure itself, highlights Moore’s interest in the “drama of the light,” as he deemed it, and the color relationships it can bring forth. Rolling Hall—what one might think of as a drab industrial complex—is rich with color; it finds greens, oranges and blues in a place you could only expect to find grays. It is no wonder that this subtly entrancing photograph was chosen for the cover of Moore’s book Detroit Disassembled, a volume containing 72 images.

Moore assembled this collection of images over the course of seven separate trips to Detroit. It is only through these re-visits, he feels, that a photographer can really become acquainted with a new place and not just photograph “the obvious things.” His initial visit was motivated by a group of young urban explorers in Detroit who asked him to come out to explore and photograph with them. These teenagers were experienced in the art of urban exploration, or urbex, and knew when certain abandoned and private properties would be accessible and just how to get in. One 18-year old, Moore said, “had been in hundreds of buildings since he was 14.”

Much of the time, urban exploration is synonymous with trespassing, because one is risking arrest if seen by the police. Asked about his own urbex adventures, Moore admitted, “I had to sneak in…you park your car discreetly, you kind of watch what’s going on.” In a sense, urbex is a sort of reclamation of lost space by the people, but what Moore photographs is the reassertion of nature in these abandoned spaces. “It’s about nature reclaiming the works of man,” Moore said.

This theme is more obviously captured in his photograph “Walden Street,” which depicts a house completely camouflaged by the vines that have overtaken it. But this sort of passage of and distortion over time is most poetically captured in “National Time,” an image of a clock face that has been melted out of shape by the heat of a chemical fire, reminiscent of Dali’s “Persistence of Memory.” “It literally melted the face of time,” Moore commented in his lecture given last Wednesday, Sept. 14.

Detroit, in the grand scheme of history, had an expedient rise to prosperity and a swift decline. The rise and fall of Motor City left much destitution and waste in its path, leaving approximately 30,000 buildings—homes, schools, libraries—abandoned. “Detroit has lost a lot,” Moore reflected. “When you lose that many buildings... it’s like losing your memory.”