The New York Times has joined the gaggle of news outlets featuring the ruins of Detroit. The accompanying essay from the August 21, 2011 Arts section discusses the tension between art for its own sake and its possible exploitation of a bad situation.  To charges that such work can be considered “ruin porn,” Andrew Moore responds that Detroit offers a point of creative tension, a place where “art meets anxiety.”  Camilo Jose Vergara encountered similar criticism when he unveiled the inviciblecities web site in Camden in 2005. Was he not just making a bad situation worse by re-enforcing stereotypes of cities?  Vergara’s response and mine, is complex.  These are places that need to be remembered for what they suggest, including not just loss but imperfections in our political as well as our economic systems.  The key is context. An artist who captures a moment in time can be suggestive, but it is hard to look behind the resulting picture to glimpse the workings of a market economy, the effects of uneven development, and the institutionalization of class difference in space as well as over time. Vergara, who has done a good deal of

photographing in Detroit himself, makes the effort in his time sequence photography as well as in his many publications to give viewers the “big picture.”  Those who are intrigued by the images of Detroit may want to participate in the equity summit located in the city November  8-11.  In hard times, we don’t like as a society to focus on the worst conditions imaginable. But knowing they exist and that that the circumstances that created them are being addressed may be of some solace to anyone who is wise enough to know that what could happen in Detroit is also happening in many cities across the country.