Desolation Photography Thread (aka Ruins Porn)

I'm really excited to start this thread bc I really love desolation photography. It seems especially hot right now, and ripe for discussion. Probably the discussion to have right upfront is whether photographing these sites can be beautiful, artistic, etc, or whether (and whether?) it is exploitive. As I understand it, the case for the latter is that beyond the range of the camera are the real human beings who have suffered, and communities that have been decimated. The case for the former, I think, is that these communities and people are often marginalized and these photographs can do their part in bringing forward their stories. Also that there's a gorgeous aesthetic associated w/ these photos - this ahistorical space of nostalgia and utopia.

Anyway, I've got a ton more to say about this stuff, but here are some articles that I think are really interesting.

Joann Greco: The Psychology of Ruin Porn - http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/ - lays out a bunch of these political/aesthetic issues in a very accessible way. I personally think the images in the story are a terrible example of desolation photography -- a little too airbrushed, photoshopped, some clearly staged (an issue also interestingly related to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which I think is a relevant precursor to this).

A lot of this writing has focused on Detroit such as Jerry Herron's "The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit": http://places.designobserver.com/feature/the-forgetting-machine-a-history-of-detroit/31848/ - which I thought was a really beautiful article that deals with a lot of these issues, and is also apparently the first of a few pieces he's going to be writing on the theme for Places this year. One thing I thought he said that was very striking (referring to the conversion of the Michigan Theater to the parking garage):

But the improvisation of the Michigan Theater is powerful because it doesn’t remove people from the city; on the contrary, it involves them dramatically in the production of their own situation. The ruin of urban space becomes a participatory drama: memory versus forgetting, the city dead or the city alive. The trick is seeing both at once, and comprehending them as equally true and mutually implicated.

John Patrick Leary had a piece last year, "Detroitism," in Guernica: http://www.guernicamag.com/features/2281/leary_1_15_11/

Finally, I only just started looking at it, but Sarah Wanechak is doing a series on "The Atemporality of 'Ruin Porn'": http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/01/12/the-atemporality-of-ruin-porn-part-i-the-carcass/

Really, ground zero for this stuff seems to be (hoax?) Elena's trips through Chernobyl which were the first photos I saw in the Internet that seemed to touch on a lot of these themes. Really interesting in terms of authenticity, fabrication, and the ethics of devastation. Also, closely linked to thanotourism which is pretty interesting too and maybe qualifies for its own thread (though I'd love to discuss thanotourism stuff here). Anyway, Elena link is: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html

There are (were?) some livejournal communities that used to specialize in this kind of photography, tho I admittedly haven't checked in on them in awhile. There are also some ILX threads that are relevant:

Abandoned Amusement/Fun Parks
Abandoned malls
ITT, ancient RUINS, ruined cities, oh look on my works, ye mighty and despair!

The reason I felt particularly inspired to start this thread now is that -- without going too much into details -- I visited a shuttered refinery yesterday as a part of my job. While I was there I took a bunch of photos and collected about 25 that I thought were particularly beautiful. The refinery was shut down because of profitability issues and pretty much devastated the local economy and community which relied on the refinery for employment. The area is particularly economically depressed, and the refinery had fallen into disrepair. I don't want to get into the details about why I went (maybe in a few months or so), but I do want to share the photos with you guys. I'm just trying to figure out a somewhat discrete way to do so and then I'll post them on this thread.

Anyway -- critical theory, photography theory, just pictures that fit this thread description, discussion of ethics, thanotourism, etc. I'm sure I'm not the only person on ILX really interested in this.

Also maybe relevant is Errol Morris' series in the NYT on photography: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock/

He specifically discusses Let Us Now Praise Famous Men here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/the-case-of-the-inappropriate-alarm-clock-part-3

JAMES CURTIS: My favorite example is Walker Evans moving furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins in Hale County, Alabama. I was talking to Alan Trachtenberg [a professor of American history at Yale]. And Alan said, “Well, when your article on Evans came out, I was mad as hell.” And I said, “Well, what were you mad about?” And he said, “Well, what difference does it make if he moved furniture around inside the sharecroppers’ cabins?” And I said, “Because Evans has been regarded as the high apostle of documentary honesty, and he said he never did things like that.” And afterwards, Trachtenberg replied, “Oh hell, we all know he was a liar.”

great evans story!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mobileohm/sets/72057594081985998/

you already posted all the links I was gonna post

I think that this is going to become an increasingly prominent hobby as more of our built environment goes to shit / easier than ever to be an amateur photographer

I'm not sure I think there's any moral problem w/ it outside of the 'people who want to see detroit just for the misery' - and even that's a form of tourism the city wouldn't have otherwise.

http://www.derelictlondon.com/

had no idea the Chernobyl thing was fake tho, that's interesting. (~experiences internet nostalgia~)

Well, the entire name 'ruin porn' (which I hate ftr) implies a kind of exploitation and anesthetization towards these economic/environmental calamities.

Ah, I'm glad you decided to start this thread in the end. Some interesting stuff there that I'll have to take the time to look through. I'd also recommend Sophie Thomas on fragments and ruins as an interesting theoretical standpoint: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Romanticism_and_visuality.html?id=Hg9EpSYZ-vAC. I saw her present an open seminar on that which got me very energised about follies (which are an entirely different thing, but theoretically hella exciting).

I also had a look for the thread on submerged towns but couldn't find it - closest I came was this: Pictures of sinking/sunken ships

Which is sort of related in the 'human manufacture thwarted and decayed by nature' sense.

Well, the entire name 'ruin porn' (which I hate ftr) implies a kind of exploitation and anesthetization towards these economic/environmental calamities.

― Mordy, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 4:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

probably the biggest takeaway I have from sontag is that a camera beautifies everything you put in front of it

I think there are several things at work here. First off digital photography means that you can have nothing more than your phone and get pics. Our dystopian future hasn't arrived quite as quickly as popular culture might have implied so it has to created, as it were. Exploring derelict buildings is something that some ppl have always enjoyed. Mortality is kind of mesmerizing.

I don't think you can exploit a long-gone calamity, tho I guess that depends on the context and in some of these cases there are still people suffering - people in detroit being the obv example. otoh bringing attention to the bigger issues at hand is always a good thing, even if it's for the wrong reason. I think.

a camera beautifies everything you put in front of it

Gingrich must be at near Medusa levels of hideosity irl then

Well, the entire name 'ruin porn' (which I hate ftr) implies a kind of exploitation and anesthetization towards these economic/environmental calamities.

― Mordy, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 9:43 PM

can Ruin Porn help?

http://rustwire.com/2011/12/27/things-are-broke-can-ruin-porn-help/

Michael, I think that's a great point and one Herron seems to be echoing in his Places piece in the very beginning. He quotes Edward Gibbon imagining the 14th century poet Petrarch first encountering the ruins of Rome:

When Petrarch first gratified his eyes with a view of those monuments whose scattered fragments so far surpass the most eloquent descriptions, he was astonished at the supine indifference of the Romans themselves; he was humbled rather than elated by the discovery that ... a stranger of the Rhône [i.e., Petrarch himself] was more conversant with these antiquities than the nobles and natives of the metropolis.

And he suggests that our gaze towards Detroit is the same thing:

It might seem self-aggrandizing to say that the post-industrial and post-millennial metropolis of Detroit works in much the same way; but it does. I can think of no other American city that feels at once familiar historically, and also alien. Familiar because this is the place where the life we all live — cars, strip malls, shopping centers, freeways, exurbia — was invented; alien because nobody here seems bothered that so many recognizable signs of wealth and culture — things that really matter elsewhere — have been so thoroughly abandoned, as if they had suddenly lost all meaning.

Re: "Exploring derelict buildings is something that some ppl have always enjoyed. Mortality is kind of mesmerizing."

I know I've done it since childhood. I just didn't take photos.

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

-sontag

obviously here, there's a shortcut!

Also, the exploitive side of 'porn' is kind of a red-herring. Something-porn just means compelling imagery or footage of whatever subject. If anything, ruin porn is more akin to graffiti artists making use of disused places, though arguably more benignly or at least less invasively.

mordy, you've seen this thread right

good places to set up a colony of noise dudes

That central station in Detroit does rather break my heart, though. I very much doubt that architecture is going to make a comeback.

I do think a lot of the lighting gimmicks, framing/staging and stuff is really kinda gross. Well, not gross. But partially what moves me about a lot of this photography is that it has been untouched and the entropy has happened without being helped by the viewer. (Distinct maybe from stuff like graffiti, neglect, etc that is human-caused but not a part of the subjective gaze.)

I would like to point out that a lot of photography of this sort has been pretty heavily massaged in photoshop afterwards!

Contrasts and lighting effects are sometimes rich in that environment, though

not really unique to this form of photography tho

Yes, for sure. And I understand that some editing is necessary (I'm not a total purist) but the photos in that Atlantic article I thought were particularly egregious.

I am not so troubled by photoshop if the primary purpose of something isn't documentary and a good image is a good image.

I mean 'Children of Men' wasn't documentary but the art direction/cinematography was quite compelling imho

how much of the enjoyment do you attribute to the belief that this kind of photography is strictly documentary, that the viewer is more stimulated by the idea that these images represent of ruin, decay, decrepitude, and how much of that enjoyment do you impute to the actual aesthetic qualities of the photograph itself?

dayo, I'm not sure I fully understand your question.

do you like the photograph for the idea it represents or because it is pleasing to the eye?

I think all photography is still representation no matter its versimilitude or the sincerity of the photographer

Hopefully I like both

verisimiluity is in the eye of the beholder

I was giving serious consideration to going to Pripyat' last year and decided, in the end, not to. Part of that was a sense of unease at some of the kitschy elements of most tours, part because i do find ruins like these beautiful and i wasn't really comfortable wandering around the site of an event that destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of people simply to get an aesthetic kick out of the aftermath.

I ended up regretting it a little. It's probably quite easy to caricature what we think our reactions are going to be in these situations. The reality is always going to be more complex. None of these photos, or excursions, can really divorce the visual from the emotional. Might go this year if i end up in Kyiv again.

I guess this is an interesting question for me because it seems the enjoyment of ruins photography rests on the ground that it is photography done in a documentary mode - and also because it seems that at least part of the enjoyment comes from the fact that these photographs are aesthetically beautiful, but if that's true...

xp

A picture of skull on desk and a picture of skull on desk underlit with creepy light are still participating in the same momento mori meme. One may be more representative of ordinary life and one may be more moody. Whichever is more effective depends largely on the expectations and aethetics of the observer. If you like or don't mind it being pretty too, it's an added bonus.

and does desolation/ruins photography somehow fall in the same category of disaster/dark tourism?

The French guy I linked upthread is all into cool effects and is largely exploiting the environment for color and light and contrast. The ppl whose photographs (unlinked, alas) of that disused subway station in Manhattan have taken all kinds of different photos. I don't mind historical or documentary approaches, too, esp if you give me some written or audio context. I just have to like the work.

I know that sounds like 'I don't know what art is but I know what I like' but that's not only partly true to me but also entireley beside the point for me. My art critiques tend more to dialogue than exposition and I like to think that they're never finished or that they're only finished when I can concretely tell you why I no longer enjoy something.

and does desolation/ruins photography somehow fall in the same category of disaster/dark tourism?

Kind of a broad question. If you fly out to Mogadishu to take wild photos of jagged, broken buildings, I might think you a little insufferable compared to a photojournalist. Might, but not necessarily depending on the work. Salgado has an ability to make me both gasp and squirm, for example.

Some 20-something with a cool camera and tumblr who wants to break inot the local closed hospital isn't going to meet with much opprobrium from me and I don't care if he evokes despair at time's arrow, regret over resources no longer available, amusement at 40 year old color schemes, or just gets some really good horror movie shots or would be arty shots.

salgado is a good example for me of a photographer whose aesthetic sense overwhelms the documentary sense

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/photographs-of-abandoned-places_n_1197538.html

^milwaukee

something about these kind of pics irks me, the detachment from the real social problems that lead to things being in that state

RUINS PR0N OF MY OWN!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardgin/sets/72157608541428456/with/2989403149/

Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

This is a good point but the slice of time apsect intrigues me for another reason. Many photos are genius not only for their composition or their subject matter but also because you can study a very specific slice of time and sometimes those slices of time tell you more than minutes and hours that surround them.

er, shit, not entirely the right link xp

the detachment from the real social problems that lead to things being in that state

I thoroughly understand that kind of reaction

so, I think one reason why ruins photography doesn't engage my interest that much is that it always seems much less 'grand' or significant than the actual subject of the photograph, in the same way that a landscape photography often fails to approximate the majesty of the scene it depicts*.

I love photographs that manage to amplify an ordinary event, a commonplace event, to levels beyond what that event has any right to reasonable evoke. ruins photography seems to be the exact opposite - the whimpering ghost-image of an experience best had in person.

*I make exceptions for truly exceptional landscape photographers, like ansel adams, whose photographs possess such a strength of their own that one has no need to ever believe that the scene depicted actually ever existed in the first place.

http://i.huffpost.com/gadgets/slideshows/204137/slide_204137_602435_huge.jpg?1326376071&1327444510397

Some of these photos I find less tragic, though. This was a coke and gas plant in Milwaukee that closed in '83. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But don't depair too much. Seeing empty apartment blocks or boarded up homes is bad but seeing a business that maybe wasn't doing so well in the face of competition or newer technology isn't as likely to elicit a tear or as much sorrow in me.

whose photographs possess such a strength of their own that one has no need to ever believe that the scene depicted actually ever existed in the first place.

They did exist but he also manipulated the hell out of his photos

what the fuck do they expect a place where cars get cut up and refitted to look like

― Nilmar Honorato da Silva, Monday, November 18, 2013 3:27 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nilmar, I think I understand your confusion. This may be very similar to what auto shops look like in your native Brasil. But in America, we generally take our cars to places like this:

http://ronaldsteyn.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/ntb1.jpg

or this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/A_typical_Maaco_center.jpg

Majestic, isn't it?

225 different autobody shops is pretty crazy. And I can definitely understand the fetishisation from a film scout's point of view. To a certain extent I can write off "post-apocalyptic" talk here as just his imagination working for what he would flog it to the studios as (though that doesn't mitigate the 'othering' factor, really). But ultimately, yeah, this: looking forward to the post-apocalypse wherein manufacturing and recycling still thrive.

And late-model Japanese and German cars are still plentiful.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/11/22/cementland_in_st_louis_an_industrial_adventure_land_sits_unfinished.html

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/11/22/cementland_in_st_louis_an_industrial_adventure_land_sits_unfinished/1384799037.jpg.CROP.promo-large2.jpg

tbh I would trust the people working in that nyc neighborhood with my car more than I would whatever animals work at the free-standing suburban car maintenance palaces linked below

Oh yes, I was just giving Nilmar some shit for being kinda a dick about the matter.

did you even understand what was being said there

probably something preachy and screechy, knowing him.

whoosh

maybe some butthurt for seeing your nation's august periodicals like www.slate.com being ridiculed, but the way they presented those photos is perfectly risible

to be fair, they just republished something from the scouting nyc blog, which I normally expect better of re: dialog

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/11/22/article-2511786-1993A32600000578-214_964x667.jpgp

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2511786/Creepy-abandoned-classrooms-dust-filled-laboratories-crammed-science-students-decade-ago.html

wow - those are really striking

why is this thread not worksafe?

prolly cuz "porn" is in the title

i don't think this is "desolation" photography, but it's perhaps a close cousin. maybe it's "desperate times" photography. whatever you call it, this series about a homeless boxer's makeshift home (since condemned and destroyed by the city) is heartbreaking and amazing in equal measure.

uh, just noticed this is a "NSFW" thread. FWIW, the link i posted is safe-for-work-viewing.

why is this thread nsfw? bc of the word porn in the title?

lol i see that i had this exact same conversation in the last bump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZoirUpwCQc

i mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZoirUpwCQc

Abandoned cars in Belgium.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/224339/photos-of-a-traffic-jam-stuck-in-the-woods-for-70-years/

Abandoned Italian discotheques.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/09/14/antonio_la_grotta_photographs_abandoned_italian_discotheques_in_his_series.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru

wow, those are great

on the east coast i often notice either old cinema buildings that have been repurposed but still have that really distinctive architecture - or old cinema buildings that have been totally abandoned. they have such a recognizable look in either case.

woah i need a coffee table book of these

would love to see what some of these places were like in their heyday

“I like to photograph what you cannot see, the suggestions a place can give you, even if it doesn't declare it in a clear and open way,”

I've stumbled upon a bunch of aerial photographs of my hometown from 1978. Seeing where the midtown interstate comes to an abrupt finish and all of the houses and infrastructure still standing in its way.

It's weird because I'm looking at something that isn't complete, whose better days aren't in the picture. It's reminded me a lot of this kind of genre, only it's happening in reverse ~or forward~ on what I'm seeing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNV5Sq28Mp4
Drone footage of the ghost city of Pripyat, Chernobyl. I love the gaudy Soviet mural and gas masks strewn all over the floor at the end.

sharivaris posts in the chernobyl thread from the other week are worth a look if u didnt see them

Ah thanks I will take a look.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/06/eerie-chalkboard-drawings-frozen-in-time-for-100-years-discovered-in-oklahoma-school/?tid=sm_fb

love that

will somebody explain this to me?

http://i.imgur.com/pCttLHN.jpg

Nineteen plus Ten equals Twenty Nine

back in the way that's how they summoned satan

I thought this was a decent discussion of the politics of Detroit's iconography, mostly focusing on the naturalization of human neglect and divestment in ruin photography: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/ruin-porn-imagery-photography-detroit/

i was at a catacomb-esque, abandoned, leaky, hospital w/out electrical a few weeks ago for work. wish i had thought to take photos. it was very creepy + uncanny

http://i58.tinypic.com/qwzgbb.jpg - i think i may have a couple shots from the basement

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/06/11/revisiting_brooklyns_abandoned_admirals_row_before_its_gone.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJtJ2zUfhow

oh wow that's wild

Yeah. I have never really given much of a fuck about the whole gopro-on-a-drone school of filmmaking, but it works really well for this purpose. See also xelab's pripyat video upthread.

Buzludzha Monument on the peak was built by the Bulgarian communist regime to commemorate the events in 1891 when the socialists led by Dimitar Blagoev assembled secretly in the area to form an organised socialist movement

https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8434/7595819400_bfe640bb5f_b.jpg

https://drscdn.500px.org/photo/1281286/m%3D2048/3fd1f6611089913f602bb0f9fcbe9946

wow

Not abandoned, but pretty desolate.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/07/indonesian-chicken-church/

On Centralia, PA and the ongoing insult of Silent Hill misery tourism: https://quarterly.camposanto.com/survival-horror-8e6bff3c0ef2

i went there in 2005 with my dad. it was raining so we didn't go anywhere really. i ripped my jeans trying to get over a tree that had fallen across a road that looked just like the one in the picture in the article with the "stay away" or whatever.

https://www.abandonedamerica.us/photo28187063.html#photo

https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/is4AAOSw5utaU7Hi/s-l225.jpg

Published by the Sierra Club in 1982

Ran across this blog a little while back and the content/photography is better than most: https://abandonedsoutheast.com