These photographs taken in June 2016 in Gary, Joliet and Chicago do not constitute an account, let alone a report… that would be to insult their inhabitants, who are living through very dark times. The town presented could equally well be here or somewhere else… now or later. The places in the photographs are accessible to everyone: nothing forbidden has been done, except where curiosity involves taking shortcuts in an environment where the pedestrian has become an anachronism on the margins of unrelenting flows of vehicles.The town spread around giant factories entrenched like military encampments or implanted by a lake amongst dunes and lagoons. A band of savannah patrolled by a few coyotes separates them, forming a kind of no man’s land traversed by highways and railways conveying endless freight convoys spanning rivers on monumental steel drawbridges riddled with rust. Impacted by the crisis, people have quit the town, leaving homes and business premises empty and falling prey to the depredations of time. Come night, the silent factories no longer light up the sky with their brown-coloured flares. Not a sound, other than a few sirens. Only the breeze still blows down the streets of the neighbouring metropolis. All that remains are the austere remnants of the ultimate crisis that devalues the work done by man to such an extent that it loses its ultimate value.