By Catherine Fox

For the AJC

Artists of yore made pilgrimages to Greece, Italy and Egypt to paint the remains of ancient civilizations. Touchstones of greatness past, those ruins were easy metaphors for the march of time, mortality and the transience of power.

Apart from, say, the cliffside villages of Anasazi Indians and ghost-town relics of the Gold Rush, the New World was, well, too new for such things. We were busy looking forward anyway, so sure of our supremacy that even the deterioration of Rust Belt cities didn’t give us too much pause -- until the Great Recession let the air out of the balloon.

Now we recognize those cities are our ruins, and Detroit, once an exemplar of American ingenuity, middle-class success and industrial might, is the biggest metaphor of all. Although the crown of the magnificent Fisher Building still gleams on the skyline, the streets down below are like a gap-toothed crone, pocked with empty lots and crumbling houses. Schools and offices are shuttered. Nature is reclaiming this once bustling metropolis.

The Motor City has attracted a host of artists to chronicle 21st-century decline, Andrew Moore among them. His large color photographs of abandoned buildings and defeated neighborhoods, a sampling from his book “Detroit Disassembled,” are on view at Jackson Fine Art.

His interest is not surprising. In photos taken in Cuba and Russia, the photographer has long shown an eye and empathy for the ironic beauty of hard times. As in previous series, these handsome images share a monumental stillness and solemnity.

Each image tells a different part of the story. Interiors of ornate theaters and ballrooms suggest the city’s former wealth. The gargantuan empty spaces of the Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant record the dimensions of the economic loss. Abandoned schools, with beakers and schoolbooks still in their places, look eerily like Pompeii.

Nature has begun to reclaim the city. The bright green flooring in an office in Ford’s old Model T headquarters is actually moss. Vines creep through rickety houses. Even if city leaders don’t act on radical proposals to turn swaths of the city into urban farmland, it may happen anyway.

These are haunting, but they give me pause. Detroit is, like Roman ruins, an easy metaphor. Sometimes too easy: A clock that looks like the melted timepiece in Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” is understandably irresistible (It also appears in “The Ruins of Detroit,” a book of photos by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre) but awfully obvious.

Though the tension between the beauty of his photographs and their depressing subject matter is critical to their impact, one could criticize them for aestheticizing tragedy. This is always an issue with art about terrible things, of course, and, as a third-generation Detroiter, I’m particularly sensitive to the idea of the city’s misery as delectation.

There’s no faulting the intensity of his investigation, however, or the dignity he accords the emblems of decline. In the end, the difference between the poetry of loss and ruins “porn” is in the mind of the beholder.

Catherine Fox is chief arts critic of ArtsCriticATL.com.

Gallery show review

“Andrew Moore: Detroit”

Through May 22. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Jackson Fine Art Gallery. 3115 E. Shadowlawn Ave. 404-233-3739. www.jacksonfineart.com

Bottom line: Moore’s photos of American ruins mourn the passing of an era.