A creative display at Detroit Urbex uses photos from different eras of the original Cass Tech High, demolished in 2011, to compress time into single images.
Black and white shots of the abandoned, decaying building are combined with color yearbook photos salvaged by urban explorers.
The result is a set of 43 montages that the site labels Cass Tech -- Now and Then, and that the online magazine Slate shares with its wider audience under the headline "The Life and Death of an Iconic Detroit High School." The publication gives this context:
Images Albert Duce took of the destroyed school were layered with photos from the 1980s and 1990s that came from a box of negatives found in the old yearbook room.
Daphnee Denis, a Brooklyn photography blogger for Slate, admires the project as "an important testimony of what the school used to be." She speaks with a creator:
"The Now/Then section about Cass Tech was started back in 2010, before demolition work had begun," a Detroit Urbex contributor who goes by the name Albert Duce explained. "We had hoped to provoke substantive discussion about the school, its past, and its future."
The most striking aspect of the "Now and Then" series is that the classrooms remained almost unchanged after the building was abandoned, still equipped with computers and furniture.
Slate's presentation shows nine of the 43 montages at Detroit Urbex.
