Nothing I have ever done has resonated as much as the photos of what I called "feral houses" last summer. A quickly dashed-off blog post written while children tugged at my sleeves ended up capturing the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and I still get hundreds of hits to that post every day. Even Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us, e-mailed me about them. With a new summer here, I am tempted to add to the typology. Here we even have a feral church:
Living in Detroit, you can easily grow numb to the things that seem remarkable to people who live elsewhere. With so many journalists and photographers parachuting in over the past few years, we have allowed outsiders to document these things and define them. Detroiters are, after all, used to all the abandoned shit. We drive past the grand ruins without a second thought. It can also be easy to avoid the parts of the city where these "feral houses" are because there is little reason to go there: nature is taking them over because nothing else wants to be there. It is often easier to just travel the web of depressed freeways than it is to drive through depressing neighborhoods. But I'll always prefer a side road I've never seen to a rut I've been in a thousand times. Seeing these feral houses is a part of our daily life in this city, and I feel compelled to document them.
