Finding Porn in the Ruin

the power of human creativity and labor and at the same time warn against the excesses of empire. These are heroic images, romantic depictions capturing the visual friction between elegant plays of light and vast swaths of destruction. There is something culturally hallowed about ruins, places that mark sites of majestic industry, that testify to the creativity of the human spirit, the will of human imagination, the capability of the human hand. Ruin photography presents us with a sublime aesthetic— seemingly unstoppable forces of progress, subjugated by the passive power of destruction. The stunning architecture captured in many of these images is made doubly overwhelming by the vast state of decay, manifesting our powerlessness. These images make us reflect on the human condition. As Marchand and Meffre state (2010), “ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension : : : making us [wonder] about the permanence of things.” Continuing, Marchand and Meffre declare: “Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.” Ruin photography presents us with emotionally complex images, offering a host of opportunities for engagement and exploitation. Photographs, like any representation, are imperfect and incomplete, open to interpretation by those who view them. There is no doubt that images can be used to enforce or overturn cultural narratives, that they can capture our attention and that they can serve as compelling evidence, but images also offer opportunities for engagement, for reflection and human connection. Inasmuch as the ethics of viewing ruin porn may call upon us to turn from it, to renounce the grubby gratification of the voyeur, at the same time ethical responses to the aesthetic call upon us to be transfixed by and open to the tensions between what was, what is, and what could be.