A visual tribute to the degradation of Detroit in the wake of the American auto industry's decline reveals regional dignity and tragedy as reflected in scenes ranging from windowless grand hotels and barren factory floors to collapsing churches and prairie-grass covered blocks.

This Collector's Edition includes the book Detroit Disassembled, and this print is signed and numbered by Andrew Moore: Waiting Room with Snowdrift, 2008, Archival inkjet print, 28 x 35.5 cm. The photograph has been printed in 2010 in a limited edition of 50 copies and is housed in a cloth box. For Andrew Moore, the wonder of Detroit's transformation is its demonstration of nature's power to devour, and, through destruction, to renew. He has remarked, "One could say that Detroit has become America's version of an open city. It's been left undefended against an onslaught of scrappers, vandals, and the forces of nature. It's a city of hundreds, if not thousands, of empty homes, apartment buildings, factories, libraries, hospitals, schools, and churches. All are abandoned and most are unguarded, barely salvageable, and slated for demolition that gets delayed year after year." His depiction of Detroit questions what the changing, precarious future of America holds.

Text by Andrew Moore, Philip Levine.

An elegy—angry, funny, and powerfully detailed—about the slow death of a Detroit auto plant and an American way of life. How does a country dismantle a century’s worth of its industrial heritage? To answer that question, Paul Clemens investigates the 2006 closing of one of America’s most potent symbols: a Detroit auto plant. Prior to its closing, the Budd Company stamping plant on Detroit’s East Side, built in 1919, was one of the oldest active auto plants in America’s foremost industrial city—one whose history includes the nation’s proudest moments and those of its working class. Its closing also reflects the character of the country in a new era—the sad, brutal process of picking it apart and sending it, piece by piece, to the countries that now have use for its machines. Punching Out is an up-close report, at once tender and angry, from the meanest, sharpest edge of America’s deindustrializa­tion, and a lament for a working-class culture that once defined a prosperous America—and that is now on the verge of eco­nomic extinction.

A photographic record of almost three decades of Detroit's changing urban fabric

"A sober witness to Detroit's greatness and its status as forgotten city." -Laura Berman, The Detroit News Please note: The spine of this volume is specially treated with black ink to evoke the industrial character of its subject. Over the past six years, documentary photographer and architectural historian Julia Reyes Taubman has taken more than 30,000 photographs across the sprawled terrain of Detroit, ambitiously mapping out a comprehensive survey of a major American city. Photographing on the ground, in the buildings and by air and water, Reyes Taubman believes that when buildings and landscape are manipulated by nature and time they become more visually compelling than almost any architectural intervention. Reyes Taubman is not pessimistic, however: "It is not a disgrace but a privilege and an obligation to listen to the stories only ruins can tell," she writes in regard to this project. "They tell us a lot about who we were, what we once valued most, and perhaps where we may be going." As Reyes Taubman scrutinizes this 138-square-mile metropolis in transition, she pays particular attention to the scale and the solidity of the buildings that characterized the former "Motor City" at the height of its industrial wealth and power. More than a photographic saturation job of a single city, Detroit: 138 Square Miles provides contextual perspective in an extended caption section in which Reyes Taubman collaborated with University of Michigan professors Robert Fishman and Michael McCulloch to emphasize the social imperatives driving her documentation. An essay by native Detroiter and bestselling author Elmore Leonard addresses the social and cultural significance of the post-industrial condition of this metropolis.

Having enjoyed four years of unprecedented access to the private interiors of Cuba's capital, Moore has created an unrivaled portrait of both its legendary historic architecture and the city's inner life. 80 color photos.