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Depp isn’t the first actor who’s had to apologize for comparing photography to sexual assault. Just last year, Kristen Stewart told Elle UK that seeing photos taken of her by the paparazzi felt like "looking at someone being raped." It's an extreme reaction to the medium, and one that Susan Sontag addressed in her seminal On Photography, in which she argued that, while images can be violated, the people on whom those images are based cannot. "One can't possess reality, one can possess images," she wrote. But in Hollywood, a world where image is everything, how do you tell where reality ends and image begins?

The answer is clearly not provided on the big screen. On the contrary. Interestingly, Depp uses the term "stupid" at least a couple other times in the interview. One of them comes when he's describing his opposition to a staged cockfight in the upcoming film, The Rum Diary. Though the cockfighting scene reportedly looks real, the roosters were protected from killing each other with pieces of invisible monofilament (in accordance with American Humane Association regulations), a precaution he appeared to think detracted from the viscerality of Hunter S. Thompson's original scene. "I think it was stupid," he told Tosches. Extrapolating from that comment, Depp use of the term "stupid" suggests his aversion to false representation. Given his stated pleasure at being photographed by fans in his everyday life, it’s the falseness of the photo shoot and the poses associated with it that seem to bother Depp.

In this, Depp brings to mind Diane Arbus' "freaks," who remain some of the most extreme examples of the falsely represented. In On Photography, Sontag refers to the technique used by Arbus, famed documenter of New York’s marginalized (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists etc.): "Instead of trying to coax her subjects into natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward, that is, to pose. Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew. Standing or sitting stiffly makes them seem like images of themselves." In a similar way to Arbus’ subjects—whose real selves are undermined by the images the photographer wishes to present of them—Depp subverts his own persona and projects that of the various fashion photographers who shoot him for magazines. In this way Depp maintains the Hollywood illusion of himself as poster boy for celebrity eccentricity.

The photographer’s power lies not only in determining how his or her subject poses, but also in how the image is ultimately produced (cropping, editing, Photoshopping, etc.); as Sontag put it, “in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.” Small wonder that Julia Roberts could tell American Photo in 2004 that she feels “stupid,” “goofy,” and “nervous"—like Depp—when being photographed and, in the same breath, say that when she handles a camera (as in the film Closer, in which she played a professional photographer), it “instantly makes you the coolest person in the room.”

Other celebs try to wrest control back from the cameraman. When I interviewed Shirley MacLaine a few years ago on the set of the TV movie Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, during our photo shoot, she chose the position in which she sat and dictated the light and filters the professional photographer was expected to use. Using a different tack, Lady Gaga caused a stir in March when she issued a release form demanding that concert photographers sign over to her the rights to all their photos taken at her shows.

Slightly harder to control are the rabid paparazzi photographers that have proliferated in Hollywood over the past decade. Popular targets have taken to disguising themselves, holding up signs (see Scarlett Johansson’s famous “I’m being harassed by the person taking this picture” sign), running from location to location, and sometimes even attacking the photographers who are following them (cf. Sean Penn and Woody Harrelson). But besides the immense danger the celebrities (and passersby, on foot and in vehicles) face in being mobbed, these off-duty stars also appear to be fighting what Sontag refers to as the democratization of their experiences.

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,” she wrote. In short, part of what these stars may be objecting to is their day-to-day experiences being nullified by the paps that are falling all over themselves to snap them for our viewing pleasure.

“Why would I want anything that's private to become entertainment for other people?” the infamously camera-shy Kristen Stewart seemed to ask for all celebrities in that 2010 interview with Elle UK. At the height of her Twilight fame, she was so used to her experiences being captured by journalists and photographers both that during the interview she hesitated before removing an iPod from her car’s glove compartment to show the journalist her music. “You want to be excited about something, normal people can be excited about their lives, and I am too, but it's such a different thing,” she explained of her hesitation. “It comes out as entertainment for other people and that makes me want to throw up.”

Explaining her moodiness around paparazzi, Stewart contended that the public is not often privy to what happens before the pictures are taken. “What you don't see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction,” she told Elle. “All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash. It's so... The photos are so… I feel like I'm looking at someone being raped.”

In her book, Sontag anticipated this type of comparison, stressing that photography requires distance while attacking someone sexually requires proximity. “The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment,” she wrote. Though the use of “push and shove” does conjure images of photographers clamoring to snap Stewart, the sexual aspect of the action is missing.

In the same interview, Stewart did, however, seem to be in tune with Sontag. “Your little persona is made up of all the places that people have seen you and what has been said about you, and usually the places that I am are so overwhelming in the moment and fleeting for me—like one second where I've said something stupid, that's me, forever." The words conjure up Sontag’s suggestion that “the force” of a photo is such that it allows viewers (including Twilight fans) to scrutinize “instants which the normal flow of time immediately replaces.” So, one image of Stewart grimacing at a crowd of paps, or a moment in which she says the word “rape,” reverberates across the universe and single-handedly becomes her undoing.

Though the camera doesn’t “rape,” it does “violate” its subjects, but according to Sontag, it’s only a figurative violation “by having knowledge of them they can never have.” Stewart herself cannot be possessed but as the subject of a photograph, an object that can be physically held, she is “symbolically possessed.”

This so-called symbolic possession becomes all the more realistic when you consider the way photography works, which Sontag explained as “never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject.” Because of this, images can “usurp reality” since it is essentially “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real.” Sontag concluded by stating that the photograph being an extension of the subject captured, the image becomes a kind of means of acquiring the subject.

The statement gives a literal bent to Sean Penn’s comment in Playboy in November 1991 in which he described himself and Madonna as “public property.” It also makes Keira Knightley’s 2007 Crocodile Dundee-style, quasi-spiritual fear of being photographed appear slightly less ridiculous. "I'm not comfortable having to be myself or being photographed as myself,” she said. “Australian Aborigines say that with every photo that is taken, a piece of your soul goes with it. And there are some days when I kind of believe that."

But Sontag's book rebuts the idea that photography has the power to capture a piece of one’s real soul. “It is not reality that photographs make immediately accessible, but images,” she wrote. What’s confusing to celebrities (and much of the rest of the world) is that our era confounds reality with photographs. “Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism,” Sontag claimed, adding that the “true modern primitivism” is not to consider the image real, but to consider reality an image that can only be realized through photographs.

Unfortunately, the only way to combat this primitive behavior, Sontag argues, is to see the photograph for what it really is, not a real instance of power, but merely a weak expression of it—as it is a weak expression of the real Depp and the real Stewart, and as such is no real replacement for the stars themselves or their bodies. “The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist,” Sontag explained. “It will be knowledge at bargain prices—a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape.”

Soraya Roberts is an entertainment writer and editor. She writes about films on her blog, Incinerater. She is also on Twitter, much to her dismay.

Photo of Stewart by Joe Seer, via Shutterstock.

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The surroundings are creamy—white couch, toile pillow in the background (on an immense chair), a framed picture on the floor (something which I personally have always associated with the haute-WASP lifestyle)—and fade into the background, and Ms. Didion, despite her strong lipstick, is made to loom among them, an unnatural position not merely for a woman of her bearing but for a writer who has made her living lurking on the outskirts of events and of experience. She cannot have known quite how Ms. Leibovitz would photograph her, but she seems, I think, uneasy with the faux-heroic framing, the Queen of the Realm ironically diminished by her age and weakness. Ms. Didion’s expression—pursed lips, eyes open wide—is of an unassaugeable pain, born bravely. Or it is nothing. Or it is the mere human evocation of the emotion :-|, a neutral placeholder.

Ms. Didion is one of the most important figures of both contemporary fiction and nonfiction, and a heart-stopping chronicler of experience—both her own and others’. A writer of her stature and in her time would inescapably be the subject of photography, and there is that famous author photo—reiterated, with variations—of a young and purse-lipped Didion, cigarette in hand, assessing the lens. Ms. Leibovitz’s portrait seems a cruel parody, allowing the surroundings to subsume the woman whose lissomeness became grimness. Any photograph of Joan Didion, given her very specific physicality, will seem unreal (Vanity Fair ran a photo by Brigitte Lacombe of Ms. Didion with Vanessa Redgrave, who played her in the stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, and it proved nothing but their dissimilarity—but this new take on her felt unsettlingly like a lampoon of the photography-of-Didion style, taking up the most significant signifiers and filling in the rest with cruel intimations of age.

To look at the young Didion (who holds a cigarette like a weapon but whose tight lips seem, perhaps by sympathetic magic, to betray at once a beatific smile and a derisive laugh) and then the current iteration is to see all of what Didion has written about growing older and losing all that once had mattered, without the grace of her prose or the sympathy one allows oneself to feel for an author using her own voice.

There is a reason, based not upon the creation of one’s own image but on a certain intensity and rhyme with her written work, that Ms. Didion’s image adorns so many paperback editions of her books. She is peering spuriously from a car’s driver’s seat on The White Album and clad behind sunglasses, jaw set, on Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The look is her white suit, but even Tom Wolfe isn’t as recognizable.

I have been in the same room as Ms. Didion once ever, at an awards ceremony for student journalists at which she spoke, dedicating an award to the daughter whose death Blue Nights chronicles. She is, as reported by herself, "so physically small," but she was not, in performing the dedication, shaky. Instead she spoke quickly and robotically as if trying to get through the speech before some catastrophe. She electrified the room to a degree Ms. Leibovitz’s creamy neutral nothing completely elides, not merely by virtue of reputation but by some demonic charisma she still possesses, a cool an inch thick over bottomless reserves of rageful heat.

She also offered the honoree of the prize in her daughter’s name carrots off her plate, which he refused.

The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the loss of Ms. Didion’s husband (while the new book is about the loss of the pair’s daughter) occasioned a spread in the Times magazine, shot by Eugene Richards. Here, Ms. Didion is frail—there is no escaping her physical smallness, no trick a photographer might use to morph her in that way—but dwarfed by her surroundings. Rather than dominating the frame, Ms. Didion, in the most memorable shot, hangs back, in a doorway, her face lower and smaller than a portrait of her dead husband. She does not look at the lens. There is bravery here on the part of subject and artist. There is real contrast with that earlier portraiture, of the confident political essayist, of the former president of her Upper East Side co-op board, all the other many things she is, that makes a statement. All Ms. Leibovitz, ever seeking sensation, shows is disgust with the frailty of the body that masks itself as reverence for the travails of the heart.

Daniel D’Addario is a writer living in Brooklyn who has contributed to publications including The New York Observer, Slate, and Capital New York.

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There’s the Detroit Lament, which he describes as an examination of the city’s decline that is mostly told through the examination of physical spaces. You may have heard it referred to as "ruin porn." And there’s the Detroit Utopia, stories which purport to show a new way forward for the city, be it through urban farming, $100 homes or bicycling. (Utopian depictions of Detroit, Leary noted, tend to involve young creative white people.)

Leary used the publication of two recent monographs of photographs Detroit’s ruins as a jumping-off point: Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (now on view at the Queens Museum) and Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s The Ruins of Detroit. He identifies them as a part of a broader “Detroit culture boom,” which has included the massive proliferation of these two types of stories—those that declare that Detroit’s decline marks the end of American postwar prosperity, and those that suggest Detroit is coming back in ways that will create new kinds of prosperity—as well as expanded coverage on television (“Detroit 187”) and in film (Gran Torino).

One salient feature of the Detroit Utopia stories that Leary does not identify is the tendency to deny Detroit Lament stories of any and all claims to authenticity. Take, for example, this VICE Magazine article “Something, Something, Something, Detroit” with the subhed “Lazy Journalists Love Photos of Abandoned Stuff.” This story is an excellent example of this unique blend of media criticism and Detroit boosterism. It is singularly dismissive of the utility of photographing Detroit's ruins.

The section below involves photographer James Griffioen, who, as it happens, takes pictures of abandoned buildings in Detroit for a living. (Griffioen says he doesn't earn a living from this; he does sell them (you may inquire within!) but receives income from other sources, including his blog, which explains more.)

James [Griffioen] took me out to the grassy mound where he photographed a long shot of the abandoned elementary school. For several blocks on either side there’s nothing visible except waist-high grass and crumbling strips of asphalt.

“If you angle the camera the correct way it looks like you’re in the middle of nowhere—but then you turn a little to the right and there’s a well-maintained, fully functioning factory, and to the left there’s this busy office park. Still, people love to take this shot, crop it so it’s just prairie, and be like, ‘Look, this is a mile from downtown, it’s turned into woods.’”

The other problem with everybody on the prairie’s jock is nobody ever bothers to differentiate between which patches went to seed on their own and which had a little outside help.

“These blocks didn’t just fall apart by themselves, the city did this intentionally. They spent $15 million clearing everyone off the land so it could be used as an industrial park that stalled out.”

For those wondering what the logic of Do’s and Don’ts would look like applied to media criticism and urban policy instead of street fashion, here you have it: there are blocks upon blocks gone fallow, but, hey, there are one or two businesses still chugging along, and what’s more, the city spent millions of dollars to make some of these blocks empty with some future economic development plan in mind, but never followed through with it. Ta da: Detroit is doing just fantastic, thanks for asking, and to suggest otherwise with pen or camera is to deny reality.

This attitude typically comes from hip young urbanites who have good lives going for themselves in Detroit. Check out Part 1 of the Palladium Boots-sponsored Detroit Lives series, hosted by Jackass’ Johnny Knoxville, for more of this strange form of reality denial that takes place when you accuse others of denying reality. It opens with a rapid-fire series of soundbytes from “Artists” and “Musicians” talking about “ruin porn” and “pick-and-choose journalism.” One interviewee in particular, Ko of the Dirt Bombs, complains about a “story in the media” on Detroit’s renowned Cass Tech High School that focused on the abandoned old building that used to house the magnet school, and ignored the new campus right next door, which was completed in 2005. Perhaps the story was about the historical preservation battle that raged over the old building’s destruction, or that it was somewhat dangerous to have an abandoned high school across the street from an operating high school, but that does not matter to Ko—what matters is that journalists dared to turn their attention to the abandonment when there are occupied buildings and cool bands just as worthy of coverage.

After this opening salvo, the disembodied voice of Toby Barlow, professional Detroit booster, tells us that because Detroit has lost one million people over the last four decades, “As a human being you do have a sense of your own voice and your own physical presence and your own possibility. When you’re riding down a big, wide city boulevard and you’re the only thing on it you feel a little like The Omega Man. You know, it’s like, ‘I am here,’ you know, ‘This is my city!’” You and I know The Omega Man as I am Legend—it’s a postapocalyptic thriller. You see, it’s okay to invoke postapocalyptic imagery when discussing Detroit if you don't benefit directly from the ruin and the waste in the form of a coffee table book.

And young hip Detroiters do benefit directly from the city’s abandonment. It’s a version of Brooklyn gentrification made all the more grotesque because it provides these people with a pedestal of righteousness to stand on and declare that there is nothing wrong with the city.

Immediately after Barlow speaks, a DJ/Producer tells us that the city of three-quarters of a million people is a “blank canvas,” an objectively false statement brutally lacking in history and context, which mirrors Leary’s critique of ruin photography and the Detroit Lament.

For Leary, one photo in particular encapsulates the “overwrought melodrama” typical of Detroit Lament photography (and journalism): a photo by Moore taken in a house now left open to the outdoors with a graffito that reads “God has left Detroit.” Ahistorical and contextless, the photo is little more than a visual “Whoa, bro.” Leary is right to point out: “Who ever said God was here in the first place?” (This is related to another valid criticism of "ruin porn" in its omission of people, another version of ahistoricism.)

Given all this bickering over who has the story right, what seems like a more reasonable question is: how many people have, overall, “left” Detroit? According to the US Census Bureau, a better graffito might read “237,500 people have left Detroit.” That’s what the numbers told us a few months back, and that’s why I’m packing my Jansport full of black Montana cans, a Holga and 20 rolls of 120 color slide film that I will have cross-processed for my monograph: The Number 237,500 Spray-Painted Onto Blighted Properties in Detroit, in Weird Colors with Shaved Negative Carrier.

The United States Constitution mandates that we make a count of ourselves every ten years so that we may properly apportion the number of Representatives in our lower house, and in more modern times, the Census also helps federal agencies divvy up their funding, some of which is doled out on a formula basis, in proportion with population. For a city, the most obvious of these is perhaps the Community Development Block Grant, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development gives out on a population formula basis—the smaller your city gets, the less money it receives.

Detroit, the Census Bureau tells us, lost 237,500 residents since the day we all woke up to discover the Y2K bug had not launched all of our nukes. That is about one-quarter of Detroit’s population circa 2000. Maybe they moved out, maybe they died, maybe they were out of town for the entire duration of the Census, maybe new arrivals just didn’t replace the various outgoing folks, but either way, our trusted temporary federal employees found that Detroit had shrunk a great deal more than it seems anyone expected. (Especially Detroit’s City Hall, who, in an unintentional hat tip to the year 2000, are demanding a recount.)

237,500 might not sound like much to someone in Chicago or Los Angeles, but in normal urban America, especially in the Midwest, that is a lot of people. Try this: Jersey City: population 247,597. Or try Orlando, FL, population 238,300, meaning such a loss would leave it with about 800 people, or approximately the number of horticulturalists that the city's Magic Kingdom employs. Madison, WI, population 233,209, would not survive such devastation, but at least it would get rid of Scott Walker. Likewise, so long Providence, Salt Lake City, Richmond or Baton Rouge.

If the number of people who left Detroit in the last decade all moved to the same place, it would be America’s 80th largest city, and, assuming they didn’t also flee Michigan (which they probably did), it would be the second largest city in the state, behind Detroit. It would fall into that category of mid-size cities that no one feels that passionately about, that motley crew that consists of dusty state capitals, large municipalities in sprawling Southland metropolises, and the mill towns of early American industry in Upstate New York, Central Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, each of which seems to feature its own regional take on processed meat.

Not to retread the territory of a Detroit Lament, but on a visit to Detroit last November, it was hard not to notice the abandonment. You’ve likely seen photographs of the Michigan Central Depot and the remains of the Packard Plant, both of which have been closed for decades, but have you driven down the residential streets of the East Side—or the West Side for that matter—and seen a block pockmarked with fire blighted homes, or worse yet, blocks where you can see clear through to the next street? Grandiose and symbolic as the larger ruins are, the neighborhoods of Detroit tell the real story.

But what Detroit is doing with its neighborhoods, using federal funds, makes the debate over ruin porn even more interesting. The Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which was authorized under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2008, provides grant money to state and local governments to “acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become sources of abandonment or blight within their communities.” In the first round of funding (there have been three), Detroit received $47 million, of which $16 million went towards demolition. HUD put a ten percent cap on the amount of funds that can be put toward demolition of blighted structures, but Detroit asked for and received a waiver that allowed for a thirty percent allocation.

Mayor Dave Bing announced his plan to take down 3,000 abandoned structures in one year a little more than a year ago, and he came close to meeting his goal. He plans to take down 10,000 blighted buildings by the end of his term. The mayor’s website has three links under the heading “Initiatives": a job-creation project called Detroit Works, a volunteer project called Believe in Detroit—and then there is the Residential Demolition Program. This is absolutely central to the city’s plans for long-term stability, and they may very well be right—no one knows yet whether “rightsizing” really works.

We can take a brief look at how it works. Here is a list of addresses on one street in Detroit, West Robinwood Street, that Mayor Bing’s administration has planned to raze using federal funds:

151 W Robinwood, 184 W Robinwood, 192 W Robinwood, 215 W Robinwood, 223 W Robinwood, 231 W Robinwood, 440 W Robinwood, 446 W Robinwood, 447 W Robinwood, 454 W Robinwood, 457 W Robinwood, 462 W Robinwood, 48 W Robinwood, 480 W Robinwood, 500 W Robinwood, 506 W Robinwood, 512 W Robinwood, 525 W Robinwood, 533 W Robinwood, 541 W Robinwood, 556 W Robinwood, 561 W Robinwood, 576 W Robinwood, 590 W Robinwood, 618 W Robinwood, 64 W Robinwood, 674 W Robinwood, 680 W Robinwood, 681 W Robinwood, 690 W Robinwood.

I count 30. West Robinwood Street lies just inside of 7 Mile, east of Woodward Avenue, in a neighborhood called Grixdale Farms, which was subdivided and built in the 1920s and 30s on a man named John Grix’s land. The street exists for only two blocks—i.e., all those structures listed above are on two blocks—and runs right under where Grix’s farmhouse stood, if we can trust olde-timey maps; it ends where the nearby Palmer Park golf course’s front nine were built. Homes in Grixdale Farms, the neighborhood website tells us, “enjoy some of the best architectural elements available to middle class Americans in the early and mid 1900’s.”

You can see all of W. Robinwood here in this panorama made by none other than the above-mentioned James Griffioen: 60 of 66 structures on W. Robinwood are abandoned (let’s imagine James Griffioen interviewed by VICE: “But what about the other six!?”). Bing’s bulldozers will leave 30 abandoned structures standing, at least after phase one of the demolition.

Detroit is in such a position that the best thing it thinks it can do with a massive chunk of federal change is use it to tear down blight on streets like West Robinwood to save them for the people who still live there, but still leave behind a lot of blight. A necessary measure in the short term that offers very little in the long-term, “rightsizing,” as it is euphemistically called in planning circles, is little more than an urban mastectomy—vacant homes bring down surrounding home values, and provide safe haven for illicit activity, and are in this sense a cancer on the neighborhood. This is not some knowledge unique to urban planners and community activists, either. You can watch 8 Mile to see some citizen-led Detroit rightsizing: The movie’s hero and his friends identify a vacant home as the source of many neighborhood problems, specifically a recent rape, so they burn it down to prevent that from happening again.

What the characters of 8 Mile and Mayor Bing have in common is that they cannot offer Detroit a cogent vision for exactly what will happen to the neighborhood after the demolitions. While blight-as-cancer is a useful metaphor pre-demolition, it falls apart afterwards. Mayor Bing’s NSP3 plan—for the third round of NSP funding—allocates only $1.2 million for demolition, out of a $22 million grant, but also only allocates $1.5 million for redevelopment. Acquisition and rehabilitation get the lion’s share of the grant, with $17 million apportioned, which is fantastic news. But all that money can only fight blight, and blight actually isn’t the “cancer” itself but a secondary symptom of the actual illness that plagues the city—a lack of jobs, commerce, safety, and now, people. It’s not just that 237,500 people left in the last decade; overall, 1,135,791 left in the last six decades.

Now, after six decades of hucksterish boosterism—stadiums, casinos, Renaissance Centers!—Detroit has finally decided that it will have no massive reboot. The city is packing it in by tearing down thousands of vestiges of its old self, its gangrenous appendages that need to be amputated. It has finally come to terms with what it has become.

All that our college-educated neophyte boosters have to offer us is denial of this diagnosis, and denial prevents treatment. Those who deny Detroit’s illness benefit from it; and they have created a sexy counterargument (even using the word porn!) that dismisses all documentation of Detroit’s decline out of hand, claiming the moral high ground while doing so.

Recently, a rapper from Detroit, Danny Brown, has made a strong case for ruin porn being not only a worthwhile, compelling art, but that it is also the best way of describing the reality. He isn’t moralistic about it, either. If anything, he sounds frustrated. On the back half of his latest offering, XXX, Brown gets a bit more serious, eschewing his punchlines about blowjobs and cheap beer for downbeat ballads about substance abuse, some of which are quite personal. From there, he has two back-to-back tracks about the Motor City’s current state, which are nothing short of devastating.

“Fields” comes first, where Danny, on the hook, describes the rhythm of what it’s like to drive down a block in Detroit: “And where I lived, it was house, field, field. Field, field, house, abandoned house, field, field.” He recollects memories from his childhood, mentioning an old friend’s house, which he describes as “just another shortcut to the store.”

The next track, “Scrap or Die” is where Danny makes things even more interesting, as we find out what his role is in all this blight. It takes the form of a street rap standby: the crime story track. But instead of telling another tale about a motel-room heist or a harrowing trip down the 95 corridor with a trunk full of coke, Danny describes in detail the process of stealing scrap metal from abandoned houses, and selling it at junkyards.

Tonight’s that night we about to get right
piled up in the van with a couple flashlights
metal crowbar gon’ get us through the door
take everything, nigga, fuck the landlord
so now we at the place skullies on bare-faced
bout to leave this bitch bare, strip the whole damn place
my Unc’ took outside, he stripping out the gutters
so we inside tearing up this motherfucker
bust open the walls just to get the wiring
took the hot water tank and leftover appliances
aluminum siding, and had to come back
cause the furnace so big it wouldn’t fit in the back

From the abandoned house, Danny takes his loot to the junkyard, where he gets shorted by the man running the operation. As he and his uncle go to steal computers from a shuttered school (Detroit, by the way, has made plans to close half of their public schools by 2014) he gets caught by police. One more hook, and the song is over.

This is the life of one musician from Detroit. It doesn’t sound like he thinks its ruin provides a great landscape for creativity. While Mayor Bing has planned to destroy Detroit to save Detroit, Danny must destroy Detroit to save himself.

And so the city is in such a state that it is destroying itself through both formal and informal channels, and the two may be feeding into one another in ways it might take decades to understand.

With so much of Detroit about to disappear, does this not provide us with an excellent opportunity to document that which we will not be able to document in the near future? Instead of decrying voyeurism, why not consider these photographs and stories a reminder that in America we actually do abandon our neighbors and let our cities die, time and time again.

That, or we can just read about Slow’s Bar-B-Q every few months. Have your pick.

Willy Staley also has a Tumblr.

Photo by Emily Flores.

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