These pictures, made in June 2016 between Gary, Joliet and Chicago, are neither a report nor reportage — that would insult the inhabitants who live there through very dark times. The city given here to be seen could just as well be located here or elsewhere, now or later. The places are open to anyone, with nothing forbidden to trespass, so long as curiosity pushes one down a few side roads in a space where the walker has become an anachronism at the margin of ceaseless flows of vehicles. The city had spread out around gigantic factories, entrenched like military camps, planted at the edge of a lake between dunes and lagoons. A strip of savannah where a few coyotes prowl separates them, forming a kind of wasteland crossed by motorways and railways where endless trains straddle the rivers on monumental steel lift bridges eaten away by rust. Struck by the downturn, people left, abandoning empty houses and shops to fall little by little into ruin. At night the silent factories no longer light the sky brown with the glow of their flare stacks. Not a sound, except for a few sirens. Only the winds still run through the streets of the neighbouring metropolis. Nothing remains but the austere vestiges of this last downturn, which so devalued the work of man that it lost its ultimate value.