Ruin porn: what’s beneath our fascination for Detroit’s decay
This morning I posted a link to this editorial from The Architect’s Newspaper, which presents a positive view of ruin porn (or Detroitism,) a recent tendency to photograph the ruins of Detroit’s and marvel at their sombre beauty (see examples here, here and here). This article got me thinking: why are we fascinated with signs of urban decay? Why has the plight of Detroit become the object of so much attention? The ruins of Detroit symbolize much more than than the end of the industrial age. They remind us that even the greatest cities eventually die, that no matter how grand humanity can be, it cannot escape a tragic fate. Detroit’s photographs are morbidly beautiful, and we can’t stop watching.
But ruin porn is just part of a general tendency to underline how much Detroit has come to suck. Yes, Detroit sucks, and we revel in remembering and detailing how much it sucks as often as we can. Back when I was living in Seattle, the Stranger (one of the city’s alternative weeklies) published a 3000-word feature titled “Things I Remember About Detroit.” Apparently all there was to remember was violence, prostitution, drug deals, dirt and ruins. I read all 3000 words with vicious pleasure. I also viewed countless photo essays about Detroit’s abandoned buildings, and I even started sharing on this blog my own opinion about what Detroit needs in order to survive.
When I stumbled upon this article this morning I decided to make a quick search about what is said about ruin porn online, and it turns out a lot of good stuff has been written, pro and against the trend. But eventually, I found a feature piece from Vice magazine dating two years back, which eventually gave me an entirely different perspective on the issue.
Detroit residents are obviously not enthralled with the interest they’re getting from the media. The city is their home after all, and they know that life there is not always all gloom and despair. But what’s probably pissing them off the most is that the view of the city we get in the news is increasingly distorted. For example, Michigan Central Station, which has been used so many times as a symbol of the local declining industry, actually closed in the ’80s and was never used, if I remember correctly. The Packard Auto Plant in East Detroit, another photographers’ favourite, closed in 1956. Examples of misrepresentation abound: a 24-year-old journalist sent by Time magazine to spend 6 hours in town in order to write a feature article, photographs carefully cropped to portray decaying landscapes, articles obsessing over the community gardens and cool artsy projects happening in town (I plead guilty here), journalists who forget to make the difference between the effect of the crisis and urban planning (some neighbourhoods were emptied on purpose)… Beyond our morbid interest for Detroit’s ruins lie a failure of journalism to tell the true story.
Photo credits: From the article “Something something, something Detroit” . The caption reads: “Climbing a hillock for a better view of the grassy wastes surrounding Jane Cooper Elementary School. If you move the camera just a few inches to the left you’ll get a bustling, well-maintained food-packaging plant in frame, so be careful to crop that shit out. Photo by James Griffioen.”
Thomas Morton, the author of the Vice article, cites the following example of a local story that goes unnoticed by the national press:
Here’s the bummer: To get a nice, wide westerly view of the building complex you have to go into the adjacent cemetery. On the outer path at the edge of the plots there’s a large, jarringly ugly sign warning visitors to lock their cars and be alert for muggers. Next to this, on my visit, there was a haphazard stack of concrete grave liners sprinkled with dirt near an idling front-end loader whose front end was loaded with topsoil and plastic flowers.
There are families of white folk who fled Detroit for the suburbs in the 60s who have now become so terrified of visiting the city that they’re willing to disinter their dead loved ones and rebury them in their current neighbourhoods. And it’s not just one or two oddballs doing this—more than 1,000 bodies have been exhumed and moved since 2002. It’s a full-blown trend.
This type of stories is being reported in local media, but never make it to national headlines. In fact, says Morton, the most accurate reporting about the city has been done by local media organizations, such as the Detroit Free Press. And while ghostly pictures of a decaying city make a nice coffee-table book, not much ends up being done over there. I’m also thinking that we do such a good job at pitying Motown, but we suck at seeing urban and social dysfunction in our own cities.
I’ll probably keep on reading about Detroit. After all, it’s still a fascinating live experiment… But I’ll take everything with a grain of salt and I’ll try to think about those who live there. Or get my fix from sprawl porn instead.
Top photo: Flickr user killerfemme.