METRO POLICY JANUARY 22, 2011
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When I sat down to my keyboard recently to Google the city of Detroit, the fourth hit was a site titled “the fabulous ruins of Detroit.” The site—itself a bit of a relic, with a design seemingly untouched since the 1990s—showed up in the results above the airport, above the Red Wings or the Pistons, the newspapers, or any other sort of civic utility. Certainly above anything related to the car industry, for which the word Detroit was once practically a synonym. Pictures of ruins are now the city’s most eagerly received manufactured good.
We have begun to think of Detroit as a still-life. This became clear to me recently, when the latest set of "stunning" pictures of Detroit in ruins made the rounds, taken by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for a book, The Ruins of Detroit. (More such pictures here and here.) They were much tweeted and blogged about (including by TNR’s own Jonathan Chait), as other such “ruin porn” photosets of blighted places have been, and were described variously as wonderful, as beautiful, as stunning, as shocking, as sad. They are all of those things, and so I suppose they are good art. But they are rotten photojournalism. (Click here to read TNR’s “The Detroit Project: A Plan for Solving America’s Greatest Disaster.”)
Pictures are naturally more memorable than a well written, evenhanded magazine story about the scope and tragedy of Detroit’s economic woes could ever be. But that’s precisely the problem. These indelible pictures present an un-nuanced and static vision of Detroit. They might serve to “raise awareness” of the Rust Belt’s blight, but raising awareness is only useful if it provokes a next step, a move toward trying to fix a problem. By presenting Detroit, and other hurting cities like it, as places beyond repair, they in fact quash any such instinct. Looked at as a piece of art, they're arresting, compelling, haunting ... but not galvanizing. Our brains mentally file these scenes next to Pompeii rather than a thriving metropolis like Chicago, say, or even Columbus.
Camilo José Vergara, a photographer who has affectingly catalogued urban decay all across the United States, released a book called American Ruins. Writing in Metropolis about Detroit’s abandoned downtown district, he made an unpopular suggestion: “"I propose that as a tonic for our imagination, as a call for renewal, as a place within our national memory, a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis. We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder." Detroit had, at the time, just built a new baseball stadium, and was angling hard for a comeback. It’s one that never happened, of course, and so Vergara looks prescient; 15 years later, a version of that American Acropolis has come about through decay, and the Web has made it so we don’t even have bring our tourism dollars there to witness it. (Detroit hotels were further still down that Google search.) But the essential heartlessness of his proposal remains.
A museum introduction to the work of photographer Andrew Moore (“Detroit Disassembled”) places him grandiosely within a larger tradition, and, like Vergara’s proposal, hints that Detroit is now about an idea, not the day-to-day business of living. “Numerous artists have used ruins to remind their viewers of the fall of past great civilizations and to warn that contemporary empires risk the same fate. … Although hard to believe that Moore's post-apocalyptic scenes reflect present-day America, he has been scrupulously honest, creating photographs that are both documentary and metaphorical in nature. “And yet later, after criticism of the way photographers have selectively elided so much of Detroit in search of only the most provocative images made the rounds, Moore steered clear of claiming scrupulous honesty, telling the radio program “The Takeaway” that his work isn’t meant to be a chronicle, it’s an evocation: “I spent three months there, and my work is really an interpretation of the city and it’s not an illustration of a story.” The problem, though, is that few other people bother to make that distinction.
I suspect it’s not an accident that the pictures of Detroit that tend to go viral on the Web are the ones utterly devoid of people. We know intellectually that people live in Detroit (even if far fewer than before), but these pictures make us feel like they don't. The human brain responds very differently to a picture of a person in ruin than to a building in ruin—you'd never see a magazine represent famine in Africa with a picture of arid soil. Without people in them, these pictures don’t demand as much of the viewer, exacting from her engagement only on a purely aesthetic level. You can revel in the sublimity of destruction, of abandonment, of the march of change—all without uncomfortably connecting them with their human consequences.
Try it: Aren’t these pictures of Detroit and its foreclosed houses, some of which have people in them, more troubling? They’re not decaying as grandly as the earlier ones—no magnificently tangled, tarnished cathedrals to industry, only ugly, squat buildings and stolen mattresses and the people who live among them. This is much closer to the reality of actually being in a city like Detroit right now. In such places, you can go whole blocks and see more boarded-up establishments than people, but it’s those people who make it impossible to disconnect and think of it as a sort of fascinating moonscape, rather than as what it is: a quietly rotting home.
Detroit's problem might not be on the level of war or famine, but it is serious—and yes, there are versions of those problems, writ smaller, in the city. More vitally, it is an ongoing problem, not a done deal. Those pictures are a funereal celebration, for a place that is sick but not dead. And it is a focus that irks activists in Detroit, who’ve been desperate for more coverage of their efforts to revive the city. (Including unlikely activists—Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame recently filmed a series looking at growth in Detroit.)
Recently, the blog HiLobrow wrote about Chernobyl, where unofficial tourism will soon turn official: “Ruin porn seeks the poignancy of abandonment, the presence and poetry of absence. … The tourists come for abandonment. They do not come for the abandoned.” It’s the same thing we are looking for in those pictures of Detroit, a voyeuristic dip into desertion. But Detroit’s abandoned are still there, though outside the frame.
Noreen Malone is a writer in New York. Follow her on Twitter.
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9 comments
The empty streetscapes should also alert the viewer to another subtext, that of racism. In all these images we see buildings and landscapes abandonned, emptied of their presumably proper owners. If the Packard plant, empty for over 50 years is a sign, it is a sign of what we once were when we were the big guys on the block, when the city was, well, white.
- riley
January 22, 2011 at 4:19pm
"By presenting Detroit, and other hurting cities like it, as places beyond repair, they in fact quash any such instinct." I fundamentally disagree with this article, hell when I saw pictures of the Library I literally thought "look at all those books that can be stolen and sold or even given away" and many of the other pictures showed places where a host of future apocalypse movies can be filmed, ready made ruins. In fact I saw a host of opportunities, but the picture of people living in squalor, with those I felt hopelessness. If not for American xenophobia the problems could be solved overnight. Sell the properties to wealthy foreigners and issue them conditional visas. If they move here and fix up these places they can stay. Detroit could literally be the American Mecca for hundreds of thousands of Arabs, a place they can build their mosques and live the American dream. But no, can't let any of them in because there might be one or two radicals amongst them, so best to let trillions go down the drain to save the thousands of damage these radicals might inflict.
- blackton
January 22, 2011 at 4:56pm
Great comment riley.
- Pnaut
January 22, 2011 at 5:10pm
Blackie - Your vision has already come to pass. The city of Hamtramack is a small part of Detroit that is surrounded by Detroit as a seperate city. Back in 1988, George Bush came to visit the large Polish Population as demonstration of his foriegn policy. Now Hamtrack is almost half Pakistani Muslims. Churches have been converted and the arguments are over the calls to prayer. The Pakistani's have added some energy and fixed up a few places. I am sure this will spill over to Detroit. The Irony is that Dearborn (Yes Henry Ford's Dearborn) which is famously racist is now home to the large Arab population. They turned Dearborn around and it's a much better city than it was 20 years ago when their motto was 'Keep Dearborn Clean' which was interpreted as keep Dearborn White. I have to think about he Decay Porn for a little to post a bit more thoguhtfully.
- CRS9TNR
January 23, 2011 at 3:09pm
Several (incoherent) reactions. 1) We are in the second "Great Depression." 2) Isn't globalism wonderful? 3) How do we (human beings) stand ourselves? 4) People are still trying to sneak into America illegally. In other words, for much of the world, living in Detroit would be wonderful.
- skahn
January 23, 2011 at 10:39pm
This piece would have greater relevancy if it even spoke to the ontological & psychological necessity that ruins play in the human psyche, the tourism trade in ancient cultural sites and the never-ending scene of photographers taking photos of ruins sans inhabitants. The article presents a false argument about "ruin porn" in that by cropping or selectively framing the photos, the photography does a disservice to the pockets of vibrancy in Detroit still in existence. By that same argument, one's photographing of Roman ruins within Rome does a disservice to Rome because you don't take pictures of squatters. I would say taking pictures of a structure in decay while inhabited presents a sociological construct of human demoralization and fetishizes suffering. I find "despair porn" far more of a disservice to the understanding of a city & its people than "ruin porn." The photography of contemporary ruins however, presents moments of understanding of cultural decay, change, architectural and archeological documentation, and the rediscovery of forgotten moments of cities in a state of constant change and not the static atmosphere we would perceive cities to be in. Perhaps Malone is not so much expressing dismay at "ruin porn" in general because it fetishizes ruins but because the current "ruin porn" of Detroit fetishizes contemporary cultural ruins of a still inhabited metropolitan area that has been on a steady decline for over 30 years. Despite the pocket cities of Arab and Pakastani enclaves or cul-de-sacs of protest-artist housing and urban farming co-operatives, Detroit has/is and will continue to be slow decay until it finds its own natural equilibrium. Want to see fetishization of ruins? Watch some of the films of the 70s where the contemporary decay of New York city was captured while simultaneously inhabited. Watch the opening 20 minutes of True Romance, shot in the early 90s and you seen a time-capsule of Detroit in decay. Watch the slow-crane shots of the smelter-town in the Deer Hunter. Or take a drive out West and drive through the mining boom & bust towns of Utah or Colorado for examples of cyclical rebirth and decay that merely delay the natural course of that town's existence. The study of Detroit is one of on-going relevance for anyone interested in the future of American cities that find themselves facing similar issues but on substantially smaller scales. Taking pictures of the active strip mall or packing plant next to a vacant, overgrown or purposely planted lot among blocks of emptiness does not disprove the ongoing decay/decline of the metro area of Detroit. Detroit represents in many ways the failed urban policies like urban renewal, redlining among racial lines, exportation of manufacturing from America and the endlessly sprawling suburbanization of American cities that have resulted in the hollowed out cores of many of American cities. Perhaps, in stead of lamenting the photography of ruins, we should look at these photos of Detroit's ongoing decay as a call to action to find solutions that would allow the decline of other decaying American cities to be arrested or addressed so that the urban vibrancy, architectural & cultural legacy of those cities does not become the next coffee-table book of "ruin porn."
- singlspeed
January 24, 2011 at 10:10am
Not being a artist, I find this discussion difficult to understand. I've looked at photos of underutilized, depreciated, abandoned and buildings in disrepair for nearly three decades. I look at them every day of the week. It is my job to get them financed so that repairs, rehabilitation, renovation and renewal can take place. Often I work with not-for-profits and local governments. During the 1980s-1990s I worked on the South Bronx--50,000 apartments were completely rehabilitated and low and moderate income families are occupying them right now. Whole neighborhoods were re-established and re-populated. It is nearly impossible to find a vacant building today. When I see Detroit, I see opportunity and hard work ahead. There is absolutely no reason why this City can not be rebuilt, re-populated and re-established into vibrant urban neighborhoods. Urban transformation is part of the American experience and we have the technical knowledge to do the job. City-State and federal financiers, architects, city planners and developers, together with the community groups and not-for-profits, have a good track record rebuilding urban America. Artists can play an important role here and often do. So many powerful and beautiful murals on the sides of rehabilitated apartment buildings in the South Bronx. Let's get beyond the hopelessness and the slobbering and get America working again.
- LawrenceGulotta
January 24, 2011 at 3:59pm
When I see those pictures that recently appeared in the Guardian of abandoned, once-great buildings, I have the following feeling: "Well, something ought to be done about that!" So, I'm not sure it's counterproductive. If I were a Detroiter or a Detroit booster, I might not like the pictures because they make it seem as though the city is more dead than it is. And I don't endorse the "runis park" idea. But, Detroit *is* in terrible shape, and I would take the pictures as just another call to action. As Lawrence Gulotta says, urban revival is not impossible. Detroit needs some TLC as he describes -- people, a plan, and money. Seems difficult, but not impossible.
- JakeH
January 24, 2011 at 4:25pm
Several of Malone's points are well taken, but like the previous commenter, I was more moved to meditate on the need to do great things (or simply something) with these shards of memories, whether that meant the literal restoration of the pictured ruins, or a more figurative renaissance not being material in my mind. I don't think--but if I were wrong I would agree with the author more---these are pleasure cruises; that would be closer to porn. There is a wistfulness and sadness that could be merely self-indulgent and indeed the artists (photogs) themselves may be wallowing in a touch of that. Artists do, however, live in a different world and what they enact in the making of the art is not necessarily what constitutes the reception of the "product"/artwork. Is Malone making social criticism or art criticism? Clearly the former of course if one were to speak merely plainly.
- Atlas-Q
February 1, 2011 at 4:21am