From a recent trip to Cairo, IL, where countless people have gone to photograph ruins. This begs the question: are dying cities just more interesting than living ones? And what does this mean for preservation?
I was reared on Stallone and Schwarzenegger films. From the time I left the womb, these movies provided respite for my mother, and bonding time for me and my father, who would invariably be blown away by the inventiveness of the latest blood altering pandemic or sexy alien-human hybrid and express himself using expletives as gleefully as churchgoers exclaiming, “hallelujah!” Whenever possible, I still run to the movies to crunch on a bucket of coconut-oil infused popcorn and feel my pulse race while taking in the newest installment of Resident Evil, or pretty much any interpretation of our post-apocalyptic world.
Some yummy post-apocalyptic carnage from I Am Legend.
So, what the hell? I am aware of my own obsession with mortality, but certainly grotesque images of exorcisms, death, and decay are universal American indulgences. I read an incredibly interesting article called “Detroitism: What does ‘ruin porn’ tell us about the motor city?” and it brought to mind something that scratches at the back of every preservationist’s mind: why do we love watching things decay so much when our passion is supposed to be saving and preserving such buildings?
United Artists Theater in Detroit (1928), photographed by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and featured in their book, titled The Ruins of Detroit. Insert zombie here.
I’ve posted about Braddock, Cairo, New Orleans, Detroit, and decaying barns, generally with great enthusiasm and with spittle collecting at the corners of my rabid mouth. I live in Chicago, where building codes and regulations strangle the life out of everything. Let’s be honest: architecture in Chicago has been boring for years. New architecture that fits within code regulations is usually boring. Gut rehabs are boring. Restrictions on greywater reuse, renewable energy sources, and a misguided idea that every person wants the same granite counter tops and 42” maple cabinets in their home has made many of our buildings ubiquitous and sleepy. While there are certainly pockets on the south side of the city full of vacant 1920s buildings, most buildings in this city are torn down as soon as possible—rather like when a shelter will put a kitten down for having the sniffles.
But still, is it okay to romanticize decaying buildings in decaying cities? A whole lot of photography has been recently published, often times developed in such a way that there are blue threads of color running through scenes like veins and a creepy 3-dimensional appearance that makes the images corporeal, like bruised walls padding bloated ball rooms. These are post-mortem crime scene photos. The pallet is rather like that of Egon Schiele paintings actually, many of which are essentially disturbingly gorgeous snuff.
An Egon Schiele painting with a similar pallet to that of many of recent collections of ruin porn. Sex, death, and vibrancy all at once. Hard to not look a little too long, eh?
Perhaps in the wake of boring architecture and neighborhood clubs enforcing exterior paint choices and lawn manicures, the crumbling of materials and the vibrancy of graffiti—of unabashedly and unapologetically screaming your beliefs onto public walls in bright, angry color—is in actuality closer to life than to death? Perhaps it’s the wildness of nature and the wonder of uncontrolled processes that reminds us that we cannot control everything on the ground. These seedy, unregulated pockets of the world make our pupils dilate and our jaws gnash with a greedy, carnal need to see more.
An image Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island, former workplace of Typhoid Mary, in New York. I found this on a blog called The Kingston Lounge: Guerrilla preservation and urban archaeology. Brooklyn and beyond. For more, see here http://kingstonlounge.blogspot.com/
Of course, we generally want these places to be accessible but not to near to us. Rather like a strip club district that is a good, safe four miles from where we actually live. And this is where I start to feel truly sleazy, because I haven’t moved to any of these places—places that I’ve photographed, written about, and romanticized myself. I’ve gone for short periods of time to work, then returned to Chicago to detox from the trip and find my healthy, safe routine again. And this, I imagine, is what pisses locals off the most in the end. Tourist bus tours through blighted areas that make residents seem like zoo animals, and a greedy need to snap up books on how f’ed up the city is, with no plan to actually ever inhabit this city that they supposedly love so much.
I’m rambling, I know, but hell, this is why I have a blog. How do you all feel about this recent upsurge of “ruin porn”? Is it okay if it brings in tourism dollars to depressed areas? Is it just a way for visitors to slum it and break routine, thereby lessening the worth of a city? Will uncovering these massive ruins shed light on the need to help restore and respect such places, or only serve to underscore how impossible these efforts are because we are highlighting a post-mortem world? Tell me. Seriously, I want to know.
the green preservationist 
Interesting point of view. I see urban decay photography as expressing love for a place and bringing attention to a place that may have been forgotten. Revealing something about our history through the building itself, and also through how and why it has been abandoned.
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I think the answer to all your questions is, and I’m not joking, yes.
Most towns and cities like tourist dollars and, these days, will take whatever sells. That said, yes it lessens the worth of an area to be known for it’s ruins — unless the city is also growing vibrantly in other areas. Let’s face it, most people go to Rome for the ruins AND the nightlife!
As to your last two questions …
Shedding light on these ruins DOES help — by renewing interest in “lost” history, thereby informing people why the structure is worthy of preservation. But, again, who has the money and is willing to invest in the projects? And is preserving that structure the best answer?
Actually, I like the upswing in ruin porn simply because it sheds light on places we’ve forgotten about. We may not be able to preserve them, or we may decide they are not worthy of preservation, but all the publicity does mean the structures are documented. It may not be up to professional standards, but a record exists where it might not have before. In a way, it’s almost like salvage archaeology — get in and find what you can, then sort it out later.
Thanks for the comment. I pretty much agree, and I definitely agree with the documentation part. I feel like the HABS documentation of days past has taken on this morphed form of snapping up pictures of buildings that we KNOW are on their way out, which is a little sad, but it’s better than nothing.
And they are beautiful, the pictures. Insanely beautiful like photos of Laura Palmer ala Twin Peaks. But we can appreciate them still for their potential for eventual life, as well as their past glory. I guess they remind me of a documentary of a meth addict that you hope will make it and recover througout the film because they actually have so many ways to get help, but then right before the credits, a little blurb informs you of what you already knew: they lost everything and/or ended up in the ground.
I’m being dramatic. Maybe I just like to be a little sad about it to tip the balance of zealots. They are like Victorian post-mortem photos to me, and completely fascinating, but also worth getting a little misty about, you know?
Great Post! This actually hearkens all the way back to John Ruskin, the original ruin pornographer, who wanted all of us to just sit and watch the world’s great architecture slowly crumble for millenia. And the greatest excitement in a preservationist/conservationists life is crawling around a decaying ruin of a building, like we did a couple of weeks ago in Keokuk. There is certainly an endless arousal for all of us in those sites in their decayed state, so porn is the right analogy here. You don’t want that excitement to ever go away, and fortunately there is enough water, ice and stupidity to keep us supplied with fresh ruins (??) forever. But we do need to make commitments, restore buildings to code for the future, sort of like settling down and having a family. But that doesn’t mean you are prevented from going for a romp in the ruins or riding 100 feet into the air in a voyeuristic fire truck to get a rare glimpse of those gashes in the roof.
I love Ruskin, actually. Love, love, love him. And ruins. Viollet-le-Duc always caused me pain, even though in practice, we are all probably more in the vein of leDuc as a means to save anything we can via adaptive use, which obviously opens up a building to compromise.
That said, I always felt so dirty driving around the levees in New Orleans in a white van full of people from Chicago and the Northwest, waving to the few remaining hanger-on residents. And then the cameras came out. Ugh. It felt like a Law and Order SVU episode. Keokuk we plan on fixing. We saw the potential for life in it. It’s tricky when the death is more beautiful than the potential for life–I mean, if you photograph Michigan Station after it’s been restored, will it be more beautiful? Nope. I don’t think so either. And I’m generally good with that–I mean, I have a poetry background and my favorite class was Building Pathology–but I feel weird around the locals, and that’s what gets me.
Not that it will stop me!
If you’re going to nick photos off my blog for use in yours – which is fine, so long as you’re not profiting from your blog – please include a link back to the original blog post!
Interestingly, I just addressed the issue of ‘ruin porn’ in an article on Huffington Post – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-ference/on-ruin-porn_b_816593.html
Sorry, looks like I said where I got the image but neglected to put the actual link up. Will add it to the caption now! Also, someone sent me this as well–thought you might find it interesting: http://www.tnr.com/article/metro-policy/81954/Detroit-economic-disaster-porn
The use of documentary photography to portray sadness and grief gave it a newfound power. Mathew Brady’s Civil War battlefield photos and Jacob Riis’s views of tenement dwellers are noteworthy examples of this genre. Ruin Porn is just a continuation of this trend. However, when we start by calling something a ruin are we placing it in a category that implies it can never be “unruined.” As a preservationist, the appeal of “the poetry of decay” as an art form matches up with the thrill of discovery of hidden spaces. Long vacant spaces evoke a great sense of the past, but the very act of decay is not something that can be easily maintained as a future preservation strategy. The Tenement Museum in New York and Drayton Hall in Charleston SC are two places that have used the “poetry of decay” as an interpretive expression, but these are the rarest of preservation responses. Many historic buildings go through a period of neglect followed by rediscovery and renewal. Ruin porn is a tool for recording the period of neglect and the thrill of discovery. Whether or not the joy of renewal follows is the next question.
That, my friend, was a lovely response. I think you’re exactly correct–it’s the term “ruin” that perhaps makes things seem a bit more glib and “tragic for tragic’s sake” than I’m sometimes comfortable with. I think it can work either way–either a space is shown to be so lovely that a movement is started to save it in whatever capacity, or quite the opposite, whereby using terms like “ruin” and focusing primarily on all that has crumbled and gone makes the effort to ever stabilize and restore a building seem that much more impossible. Thanks, Mike!
Ruin? — or patina that makes it feel “authentic”? A texture that tells us humans were once there and no one has interfered with their presence since so there is a direct link between you and them.
Open a door to a townhouse that is tidy, with Victorian knick knacks lined up in a row and you will get a sniff of interest… but open the door to the next house in the row, where peeling paint hangs from the ceilings and bits of horsehair plaster collect on the floor and it sparks the imagination — can you feel the past tenants? was that a ghost? what was it like before?
It’s a lesson to house museums that the mind wants some room to play, explore and imagine. The “ruined” rooms are often the most popular. The rooms behind the closed doors are often the ones that fascinate.
Wow, wonderful blog layout! How long have you been blogging for?
you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your website is magnificent, let alone the content!