Finding Beauty in Decay

Here’s a strangely gorgeous photo essay by artist Lowell Boileau, who is apparently a growing name in the field of artistic urban ruins.

Boileau’s pictures highlight the ruins of Detroit. That city's name has been synonymous with “urban squalor” for longer than I’ve been alive, but until I saw Boileau’s work I had no idea just how far it had fallen.

Of course we’ve all seen plenty of ruins or at least pictures of them—Pompeii, the Acropolis, Angkor Wat—but Boileau's pictures show that such images are far more haunting when it’s pieces of your own culture and country crumbling into rubble.