civilized ku # 891 ~ ruin porn
Monday, March 14, 2011 at 03:01PM 
Mill ruin ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenI have dipped into my archives to come up with the accompanying mill ruin picture.
FYI, in order to dig more detail out of the deep shadows (most noticeably under the stairs), I re-processed - RAW conversion and PS work - the file. Since I was not using the ISO bracket technique at the time this picture was made, I RAW-converted the file 3 separate times - "normal", +1-stop, and +2-stops . The 2-stop over file was used - select, copy, and paste - just for the under stairs detail enhancement. As to be expected, the +2-stop file did exhibit some noise and processing artifacts in the deep shadow area. However, due to the fact that, in the original scene, the area under the stairs was "murky" at best, a little PS noise reduction cleaned it up without any problems.
Once the image was assembled, I judged the "corrected" area under the stairs to be too light. Using Curves, I darkened it to what my eye and sensibility determined to be the proper murkiness. A few other localized adjustments and a global color de-saturation later, I had what I considered to be a "finished" product.
But, all of that said, that's not why I brought you here today. What has been on my mind as I have been viewing the on-going disaster in Japan is the fairly recently introduced notion of "ruin porn". As you might expect, a picture label that includes the word "porn" is meant as a pejorative, not as a compliment.
In the case of ruin porn, the nomenclature castigation is hurled at: 1) photojournalists who depict urban decay for emotional / political effect, while ignoring more positive signs of "well being" that, in many cases, are just out of the frame of urban ruin pictures. This complaint most often is sourced from politicians / residents in whose neighborhoods / cities the ruins are located, and, 2) picture makers in the art world who create stunningly beautiful ("horrible" beauty) pictures that tend to obfuscate, if not completely subvert the truly horrific human back-story of the depicted ruins.
Consider this by Bryan Finoki from his essay the anatomy of ruins:
Ruin porn is a war on memory, dislocating the political dynamics of ruin in favor of momentary sensations and lurid plots. The state of ruin is seen as exactly that: a condition rather than a continually unfolding process. In fact, ruins evolve over time; they are the result of construction as much as of destruction; they are forms that fluctuate as other processes transform the landscape. Decay is, in this sense, a political morphology, a timepiece for decoding the narratives of social failure, disentangling the relationship between initial crises and the “second crisis” of political fallout, gauging institutional rot. But architects and filmmakers, journalists and television producers, religious zealots and conspiracy theorists, novelists and video-game developers have all become mesmerized by the grandeur of ruins, submitting themselves to a state of aesthetic arrest; the apocalyptic image reigns supreme.
I will freely admit to being visually "mesmerized by the grandeur of ruins" but, that said, I have neither pictured ruins for journalism usage nor have I ever been afflicted by a "state of aesthetic arrest" in the making or viewing of natural (Katrina-esque) and/or manmade (Detriot-esque) ruins / decay.
As an example - I am unable to view ruin pictures, as visually stunning and people-less as they may be, made in Detroit (the epi-center of American ruin picturing making) without being deeply affected by the human story - suffering, death, greed, avarice, ignorance, ruined lives, et al - associated with the depicted ruins.
Despite the visual beauty and complexity of most of these pictures, I find them to be extremely emotionally and intellectually depressing. That's because I can not, under any circumstances, dis-associate them from what, in my mind, are signs of the decay and possible ruin of life in the good 'ole US of A. Ruin and decay that are intimately connected to the aforementioned greed, avarice, ignorance, and downright stupidity (individual, cultural, and political) that has been granted a virtual license to kill ("Death to America") in this country. As well as depressing, I find it very ironic that, in a cruel twist of fate, so many American citizens are doing a much better job of bringing "Death to America" than are our self-declared enemies.
All of that said, I can't help but believe, in the art world, there are many who are making plans to head to the latest ruins (or are already there) and, to be honest, I would very much like to be one of them. But, just because many of the resulting pictures may be visually "beautiful", that does not necessarily mean that intellectually and emotionally aware picture makers are "mesmerized" by the grandeur of ruins/decay nor that the intellectually and emotionally aware viewers of their pictures will be reduced to "state of aesthetic arrest".
Pictures of ruins/decay - photography and painting - have been with us for many millennia. Over time, these pictures have told and continue to tell us much about what came (and went) before - not just about the physical form of things but also, to the informed and imaginative viewer, about the human condition inexorably associated with the ruins in question. The best of these pictures meet the "greatest challenge to the photographer ... [to] express the inner significance through the outward form" (Beaumont Newhall), or, as Susan Sontag expressed, "The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, 'There is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.'"
As is always the case, stupid is as stupid does and a picture will always be exactly what the aware and imaginative or, conversely, unaware and unimaginative viewer makes of it.
Reader Comments (1)
Something I hadn't really considered, but was brought to mind when I read this post for some reason, is that it was fashionable in the 18th and 19th century (or there abouts) to fabricate ruins on ones estate. If I recall corecctly think Schonbrunn and Versaille both have artificial 'Roman Ruins' on their grounds. Something to think think about.