Empty room of the vacant Casemates Barracks & Prison, Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda (photo by Travis Parno)
I’ve been thinking lately about a recent (and excellent) post about the politics and archaeology of so-called “ruin porn” by Paul Mullins. In his entry, Mullins delves into the contemporary fascination with ruins and ruination, particularly as it is expressed in art photography. He outlines the critiques of approaches that sensationalize and aestheticize ruins, using these discussions to explore the underlying politics of documenting, and indeed relishing, the traces of ruination. Mullins thoughtfully probes the label “ruin porn,” arguing that although such photography may be guilty of fetishization, it shouldn’t be rejected outright. He instead maintains that, “any photograph is a selective representation of reality that cannot hope to capture concrete experience. Pornography does at least visually own up to its desires.”
Mullins’ post is thought-provoking and offers an exciting look into an extremely contemporary debate. As our economy continues to muddle along, we have become increasingly familiar with the aesthetics of decay and ruin. From streets and buildings to homes and lives, we’ve seen the tragic results of years of fiscal downturn. They are emotional and visceral. This is where concerns with images of ruination arise–the human toll, exacted over weeks and months and years, is not immediately evident. Knowing this, the thought of someone, anyone, getting pleasure out of these scenes (destruction in slow-motion) is upsetting. These are sentiments with which most would agree.
Another scene from the Casemates Barracks & Prison, Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda (photo by Travis Parno)
I worry, however, that we risk denying the potency of the imagination. Photographs, while ostensibly static images, are a known commodity; that is, most contemporary audiences possess at least a working knowledge of their production, from a real scene to a composed shot to a captured image to a distributed picture. We know what it’s like to hold a camera, measure an angle, and press the button. This familiarity with a picture’s production does not vanish when we view an image. It may retreat into the subconscious, but we’re typically aware, when looking at a photograph, that we are looking at something produced by an individual with a camera (here I’m excluding abstract images designed to divorce the photograph from the photographic process–sometimes it’s tough to tell exactly what we’re looking at!). There is a narrative to photography that extends from the life of the depicted scene through to its capture on film. When we view a photograph, our mind tries to catalog the scene, fitting it into a constructed story. It would then seem unreasonable to suggest that, when seeing an image of ruination, we are unable to fit the picture into a larger narrative of decay. It may not be reflective of a distinct reality with fixed details, but we sense that these decrepit buildings were not built decrepit. They did not spring forth in an advanced stage of decay; time dragged them into debilitation.
The trouble, according to critics, comes from seeing beauty in the breakdown. Here I echo Mullins (and others, such as the Ruin Memories project and Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal) who argue that archaeology should confront elements of the contemporary past that may be painful, awkward, or politically incorrect. I also wonder though if we aren’t guilty of conflating aesthetic appreciation with a lack of empathy. Can we appreciate the beauty of a photograph and the tragedy of its condition simultaneously? How much self-flagellation is appropriate before we’re able to gaze in awe at a striking picture? Ruin porn is not the first movement to elicit these sorts of questions. For instance, the work of New York City crime photographer Weegee at once shocked and fascinated audiences in the 1930s and 40s. Weegee’s subject matter was different and more immediately graphic, but was instilled with similar emotions, captured in an artistic, gritty, and evocative light. Today his photographs hang in museums. There is no doubting the loss contained in Weegee’s subjects, but can the same be said about images of ruins? Must every ruin symbolize catastrophe? Is there such a thing as a triumphant ruin, a building that was not the stage for some vicious downfall, but was rather simply left, forgotten, and then transformed into a thing of beauty?
Metal detritus on Glass Beach, Kauai, Hawaii (photo by Travis Parno)
Archaeology, as it sits at the intersection of the temporal and the material, is one way to explore some of these questions. Many contemporary archaeologists are immediately drawn to the difficult stories and they are to be applauded. Theirs is a challenging path, but they often are able to draw out the significance of contemporary ruination and strife, however distressing or laborious it may be. But attention is also due to those less traumatic tales of spaces that slipped through the cracks, those triumphant ruins that live on in ruin porn, unabashed at their glorious nakedness.
Okay…I get the idea that photographs do not entirely abstract from real conditions or hinder our connection to real events. But what buildings are ever just left, forgotten? I can’t think of any.
I think of it less as just forgotten, and more buildings that enter a sort of limbo–maybe they’re at the bottom of the city council agenda, maybe an ownership group can’t sort out what to do with them, maybe there are long-term hangups in construction plans. I just tend to wonder about spaces that don’t have such a fiercely painful past, one of such abject failure. What are the conditions and ramifications of capturing such buildings, how do we sift them out, do we even want to? I think these are some reasonable starting questions when considering the politics of ruination.
That makes sense. I’m not a photographer, so the issues and terms at stake are less immediate to me. Having said that, this (and paul’s piece) made me think that I need to understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics better than I do. So, thanks for that.
Very well done! This is a beautiful and evocative post, while still intellectually rigorous. Your idea of the forgotten ruin makes me think of the Pillsbury A Mill in Minneapolis.
What I enjoy most about either looking at pictures of ruins or the ruins themselves is trying to image what they originally looked like. Also, what happened to bring them to ruin.
Some of my friends live in abandoned or “ruined” buildings, making do with spaces in old factories or office buildings. These places don’t always have walls between bedrooms or reliable running water, but they do offer a benevolent appeasement of the still-present American desire toward colonization of a space. You have to build those walls yourself, paint over the faded spots, and figure out how to clear out mildew and mice. And, of course, you get to play with your band whenever and however loudly as you’d like. That practice should sound familiar; Artists have been doing it (with positive impacts on surrounding neighborhoods) for quite a while.
I wonder if ruin porn photography is very different as a practice. It is a similar art of finding beauty where others did not see it, in large part because they had never dared to go there. It’s a melancholy beauty, one that reminds us of what we may have wasted or who we may have wronged as a society in the past.
i THINK RUIN PHOTOGRAPHY…provides the historian and/or archaeologist with what may be one of the few records of that particular structure. And some of us seem to value decay…modelers of trains will often “weather” things to make them look more realistic. I don’t see that the same as pornography, which actually breaks societal rules to provide entertainment in a vicarious, shocking, addictive and stimulating fashion. Old structures fascinate by FOLLOWING the rules…of thermodynamics, for example.
Very good post, very thought-provoking. In response to Quentin Lewis, I have seen many buildings that neglected *as if* they had been forgotten; for example, some of the buildings on the abandoned farms I’ve seen across America.
I like your thought process here. I do find ruins beautiful, and they always make me a little sad. They’re so abandoned and forlorn looking.
Ruins have always fascinated people because they remind us in the most “concrete” sense of our own impermanence and mortality. There is something inherently beautiful on a very basic level about the process of entropy and watching a thing that is manmade and ostensibly permanent return to its constituent parts as we all must do. From Piranesi to Ozymandias to garden follies, artists have been concerned with portraying ruins for a very long time. The problem arises when the ruin is recent enough that its former occupants are still implicit in the narrative. Then the beauty potentially becomes clouded by their suffering and feels a bit exploitative.
Nice post and pictures also.
I’m ignoring the reference to porn and focussing on the idea of the politics of allowing the distribution of images of ruination. I grew up with the old and run-down. The second house my grandparents built and lived in sat beside the first, smaller house they built and lived in and had five children in. We called it the old house. We were not allowed in because it was full of old stuff and dust, and the timbers could no longer be trusted. I thought it was beautiful. I still think it is beautiful, 50 years on. It is not pulled down because it represents so much of the pioneer spirit that imbues my family. I despair when the old is cleared away for the new. Perhaps I would not mind so much if the new was not so often garrish, flimsy and made not to last. We ply our culture with images of the ruined to remind us that some things are bigger and stronger and resilient and tactile enough to last so that in years to come we are reminded of what we were and, if necessary, can be again.
Interesting piece. I think it is so important to take pictures as I am always so fascinated with ruined building and what they once were, but sadly many in limbo risk disappearing eventually altogether. I just photographed an old colonial era building in Hanoi that when I cycled past the other day it had been pulled down! I also snuck in and explored a villa that a fleeing Hailie Selassie stayed in in Khartoum – broken lifts and empty ballrooms now lived in by squatters as external forces begin to pull one wing down…. So sad as in a place like Sudan old architecture is for many reasons not a priority. Need to put those pics upin to a blog piece one day!
Well written … your writing made me stop and go back to the beginning and read ‘properly’. I wonder if the beauty we experience / notice is because we have empathy for it’s story either known or unknown
Thank you!
I rather think that most of us are at heart quite conflicted between optimism for a bright, clean future and lamenting a glorious, mythical past, even if we don’t akwaysconsciously frame the conflict in those explicit terms. “Beautiful ruins” in some ways crystallise the lamenting side of our nature.
As long as we remain aware that the beauty of the ruin is more in the mind than in reality, that’s no bad thing. If that appreciation of ruination begins to dominate our sense of reality generally and aesthetics in particular, I feel it’s quite a sad way to view the world. Wistfulness can be incapacitating.
I agree. anyway if we worry too much about people finding pleasure in art for the wrong reasons, arts not gonna get made, and the truth is never going to be told.
I am both a some-what reluctant historian and an urban explorer. I began photographing long standing ruins in my community about two years ago and blogging about the history behind these places….I’ve focused on an abandoned hotel, a long abandoned zoo & one that was recently left to sit vacant, a coal breaker , a ghost town, a drive-in, and two very old fashioned, community-centric amusement parks…
What draws me into doing so is a mixture of curiosity, a love of history, a drive to capture the human element left behind in these places where people lived, worked, played or worshipped and also the awe of witnessing how nature always reclaims what man leaves behind….
As an urban explorer (a person who explores abandonments), I am part of the community that feels compelled to document these ruins…..from a historical perspective it is important to do so….it’s part of the history of these locations and our collective history as human beings. I know one woman who focuses on photographing abandoned mental hospitals and she does so for several reasons….people were often just locked away and forgotten, yet these structures are still standing today, where you can find personal belongings that were left behind. She’s trying to give those people a voice while striving to document the evolution of the way that our society has treated those who are mentally ill.
Many people who explore cities like Detroit say that they do so to show how wasteful our society can be…they will often talk about how they will hear that schools in that area are struggling to serve students without necessary supplies and yet a few blocks away from an at-risk school district, an abandoned school will be sitting with unused boxes full of books, art supplies, computers and athletic equipment…
One building of historical significance in my own community was left standing in a state of condemnation and ruin after a failed preservation attempt. While our community was hotly debating about what to do with the structure–continue to strive for preservation or just demolish it and start over–I felt the need to get inside to document what was actually there in order to make a more informed decision about where I stood personally on the issue. I wrote a blog post attempting to capture the issue from the building’s point of view:
http://cherisundra.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/hotel-sterling-the-undead-days-part-1/
Sometimes these explorers are almost like archeologists of the industrial decline of America. I had the chance to go through an abandoned lace factory where the employees were let go mid-shift in 2002 and what remained behind was a ghost-like museum of lace-making complete with employee belongings and lace left at mid production:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheri_sundra/sets/72157626489415151/
I love to photograph a ghost town from 1924 that has been left standing as a monument to the “company housing” living arrangements that were experienced by the people who worked in and were exploited by the local coal mines that used to dominate the area:
http://cherisundra.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/hello-world/
And it’s exciting to go there today….people have found a new, underground purpose for this location. There is something amazing about a place that is left to disappear into history that creates a second life for itself:
http://cherisundra.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/spontaneous-acts-of-art-concrete-city-ruins/
I think that over all, as a community, urban explorers are vastly misunderstood and our motives are greatly underestimated….
A topic close to my heart, and so well done. I do want to go back and read it again when I have more time. Well done!.
Okay, not that I have had time to go back and read it in it’s totality, I admit I am one of those who loves photographing old, abandoned buildings, falling down from neglect as well as the weight of the plant overgrowth, how it affects the structure, and of course the kudzu vines dragging it down. I’m love to look at what once was… if that makes sense. The grain of the wood, the angles made by the deterioration, what it was used for, when etc.. I do live in the South so we have an abundance of these types of buildings, old rusted out cars,
intriguing old grave stones and burial plots (like from the 1700′s). My main problem is having my camera at the right time, getting permission from the owners without them thinking I’m nuts, and getting my husband to stop the car. So I’m guilty… anything old I adore from a historical aspect. Down here, the hottest furniture right now is made from 100 yr. old barn wood, old up-right pianos, & refashioned, & distressed furniture. (Sorry I had to add this as a reply – I’m obviously blonde..LOL)
Reblogged this on Eu, la feminin.
wow. this is a topic i’d never really thought of or heard of. super intense stuff. you’re a brilliant writer, thnks for sharing! x
Thanks for sharing and congrats on the FP!
An interesting and thought provoking post, which has generated so many different responses and angles. Just as with the organic process of decay, the process of human habitations changing form and function, can be fascinatingly beautiful, redolent with change and potential. They stimulate the imagination with possibilities and I think it is a function of our brains to enjoy the comparisons that we create. Isn’t this what we do with Pininterest? I also believe we have a deep seated drive to find shelter and that where ever we go, we are unconsciously looking for a place where we could stay if need be. Ruins also remind us of others lives and in seeing their surroundings we get glimpses of how they lived, some may choose to use as an art form, some may choose to reverse the decay process, some may become part of that process. Whatever, happens I believe that ruins are part of an ongoing process and not an end point.
It’s so incredible how destruction / deterioration can be so inspiring. Thanks for sharing
Ooo, really good post about a topic I’ve not considdered but am now profoundly interested in. I love “ruin porn,” as you put it, and have not thought of it as porn before. My focus as an amateur photographer of ruins, is always on the life still existing in the place – mostly the return of natural elements, such as plants and critters to a once human domain. One could suppose that the rebirth of natural habitat is the focus and the human-built structures were the actual tragedy or ruiners of life in the space. My best shots are of rusted or old structures/machinery with plant & animal life reclaiming those areas, and in this sense, they are not even shots of ruin – they are shots of joy and rebirth. There is always hope in what humanity sees as ruin.
I’ve always enjoyed photos of ruins. I think they keep us humble in a way. If something could happen to one civilization, then it could happen to our own, as more contemporary ruins porn shows us. But there’s also the possibility if rebirth in ruins. In my city, old warehouses along the waterfront have become restaurants, shops and bars. There’s always the possibility of something new.
Reblogged this on Brent Fortenberry's Research Pages and commented:
Some more on ruination.
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