Fisher Body Plant 21 opened in Detroit in 1919 and manufactured automobile bodies for General Motors. Designed by industrial architect Albert Kahn, the massive reinforced-concrete factory represented the scale and innovation of Detroit’s automobile industry at its height. The plant closed in 1984 as manufacturing jobs disappeared and the city’s population declined. Its broken windows, graffiti and empty production floors later became one of Detroit’s most recognizable industrial ruins.

I photographed Fisher Body Plant 21 while working in Detroit in 2016. The enormous empty factory was visually compelling, but by then I was trying to look past the familiar image of Detroit as picturesque decay. The more important question was what the disappearance of places like this had meant to the people and neighborhoods built around industrial work.