Images of Detroit: Visual Representations of The City by The Media and its Residents

This thesis examines the role of images in the construction of urban geographical knowledge. In recent years Detroit has become highly visible through ruin photographs based on emptiness and disrepair. Previous research indicates that cities with consistent news coverage based on negative events results in these cities becoming a symbol of those events. This thesis explores the ways in which Detroit’s physical urban form is visually represented by the media and its residents. Through including visual representations made and selected by its inhabitants a multi-dimensional image of the city is created in which residents instead of ruins become center stage. The research data was collected over a period of six weeks in the field and four months of desk work, using qualitative methods including thirteen semi-structured interviews, participant observation, photo-documentation, analysis and -elicitation. The findings from the research exemplify how the media uses ruin photograph as a way to visualize the city based on objectification, exploitation, and detachment. Residents interpret these visualizations in relation to daily events attaching them to social memory. Visual representations of Detroit by residents become a highly subjective visual critique to the dominant ways of seeing put forward by the media. We can deduce that images are powerful knowledge generators that in a time of intense visual consumption in society ask for visual literacy