the rust belt, ruin porn, and neglect

I’ve had these pictures from Detroit and Gary sitting on my hard drive for almost a year now.

The thing is, I don’t usually explain my photography. I caption photos most of the time, but the captions have very little to do with the actual content of any given photograph, and with few exceptions, the more emotion I have about a photo, the less the caption has to do with that emotion. Most probably, this is indicative of intimacy issues or something like that on my part, but it’s also about the fact that by and large, I don’t think art can or should require explanation.

The pictures from Gary and Detroit require explanation.

They require explanation because posting them without telling you why I took them feels false and hollow. They require explanation because so many pictures of Gary and Detroit don’t explain. They require explanation because taking those pictures means I owe explanations.

I take photographs of abandoned places. Of old things. Of cemeteries. Of roads that no one drives on anymore. Of buildings collapsing into dust. Of bricks being torn apart ever so slowly by the inexorable growth of trees.

I do it for a lot of reasons. Some of them are easier to explain than others. Walking through old cemeteries is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The epitaphs say so much about how people lived and loved, about how they felt when they lost those they loved. Even those who wrote the epitaphs are gone now, but their love still lives for anyone reading their heartbreak. Someday, even those words will have faded. Some of them have already. They knew they would when they wrote them and still believed it was worth it for the time they would last.

Buildings falling apart are everywhere. For the last two and a half years, I’ve made the drive from Lafayette to South Bend and back again an average of twice a month. A defunct gas station sits along U.S. 31. I don’t know when it was last in use, but whenever it was, gas was less than two dollars a gallon. Two and a half years ago, the roof was sagging. One day in winter, it collapsed entirely over half of the building, the roof and walls sliding down into an endless nap. Closer to South Bend, a house that I never realized was unoccupied had a huge tree limb plummet through its porch roof during an early spring storm a year ago. Now the house and the tree both lean, supporting each other as best they can while time and weather push them harder every season.

Nearer to Lafayette, on State Road 25, houses people lived in two and a half years ago are empty now, their curtainless windows blank and blind. Many of them will be bulldozed into oblivion when the new S.R. 25 is laid, just like the trees between Logansport and Fulton were. On one drive they were alive, a young but burgeoning forest, and the next they were dead, hundreds of them hacked down and lying lifeless on the muddy ground, waiting for the construction project’s next phase. Waiting for progress, like the blind houses are.

These places are beautiful. Here, people lived, people loved, people laughed and cried. These are the buildings that people have created, that people dreamed of and worked for. This is why I take pictures. For me and for them, because nothing remembered ever really dies. Some of those pictures are ones I have posted. Some of the places are gone now. Some will be soon. I remember them.

The photographs I take fit into the category of what many people would call “ruin porn.” It’s a term that I find it hard to grapple with, because I think the definition of “porn” being used here is one that’s fundamentally negative, and I don’t believe that all pornography is necessarily exploitative. But I’d rather address how people describe it and react to it than quibble over the term:

• In RustWire, Richey Piiparinen tells us that he believes ruin porn “has ‘outed’ ruin. It did this through the simple act of caring to look. Before that ruins in America really were a pornographic experience: a scene from the underbelly, of and for the poor, the scrags. It was a private affair dirtied through the interaction between the filth of the aesthetic and the guilt of the observer for having to live with it. But by outing and framing it—not to mention capturing the inherent beauty in broken things—Ruin Porn exposed the failure and decay, thus clearing the secrecy, the shame, and leaving perceptual room to see less emptiness and more space.”
  
  
• In bfp’s post on Feministe, she describes “ruin porn” as “very similar to other phenomenons that Feminists do know about and have an opinion on, things like poverty porn or even just porn itself. It is a fetishization. It is a camera trained with a hyper intense gaze on a subject. It is viewers getting off on the most vulnerable moments of the subject,” going on to say that “There are very few people born and invested in Detroit or the various Rust Belt cities that find these pictures appealing…These pictures do show Detroit. But they don’t *represent* Detroit. They don’t make up what Detroiters love about Detroit. And they certainly don’t represent the real problems of Detroit. Or post-industrial cities.”
  
  
• John Patrick Leary’s (well worth reading) article in Guernica points out, “So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.”

I point to the statement I quoted from Leary. This is why I owe the explanation. This is why I haven’t posted the pictures yet. Because a disintegrating house here or a collapsing gas station there—these are part of larger narratives, yes, narratives of deindustrialization, of suburbia, of what “Progress” means in America, of what and who becomes grist for the mill of capitalism. But they are not creating or contributing to the narrative of a specific place and the people who live there in the way that photographs of Gary and Detroit’s abandoned buildings do.

The Rust Belt is where I come from. I was born in Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. I grew up in Allegheny County. Pittsburgh is and always will be home. My home. When I was a kid, we moved to South Bend, a city I didn’t realize I loved until I left it. I love the Rust Belt cities. Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Youngstown. Akron. Gary. Detroit. Chicago. Grand Rapids. Johnstown. The two places I’ve lived longest and loved most are numbers 6 and 8 in U.S. News’s report of “America’s Dying Cities.”

And so. I come back to “ruin porn.” To bfp’s claim that these pictures “showcase ugly old abandoned Detroit (or any post-industrial city),” that they don’t “*represent* Detroit,” that they “don’t represent the real problems of…post-industrial cities.” And I say: These pictures do represent the Rust Belt. Industrialization was the driving force that made these cities what they are, and it is the driving force for what they are becoming. Pittsburgh was steel mills just as much as it was rivers and mountains. Trains carrying coal, Three Rivers Stadium, Heinz ketchup, suspension bridges, the brownfields of Hazelwood Coke Works, Clark Bars, the Liberty Tunnels, salads with steak and french fries, PPG Place, Kennywood, Isaly’s chipped chopped ham, St. Clair Village, the Cathedral of Learning, collard greens from the Strip District: They all represent Pittsburgh as it was or as it is. They are Pittsburgh, just as much as people saying “yinz” and the Steelers and the Inclines, and so are deindustrialization, gentrification, and disinvestment.

They are the Pittsburgh that, according to U.S. News, is dying. Like Detroit. Like South Bend. Like Cleveland. Like Flint. Like Grand Rapids. That’s the underlying narrative of ruin porn, isn’t it? This is what concerns bfp and Leary: The narrative that these places, our homes, are dying. Maybe some of them are already dead and this is just the last twitching of the corpse before rigor mortis settles in. Such a shame that these once-beautiful buildings are being destroyed by those people who don’t even appreciate what they once were. Urban decay. So sad, yet so very fascinating. Like it’s just an interesting circumstance that this is all happening, except that this narrative insists it already has happened.

Let me make it clear that I’m not disagreeing with bfp and Leary, not about this. Not at all.

I’ve seen a hell of a lot of posts from people who are “grossed out” by homeless people interfering in their privilege to take pictures of the corpses of once-loved buildings. Professional photographers who have the money hire police escorts to make sure nobody who actually lives in the city or in the buildings they’re photographing can bother them. God forbid someone living in the place you’re photographing with 15,000 dollars’ worth of camera equipment should ask you for a dollar so they can buy a coffee. People get offended about homelessness. Like homeless people are homeless just to annoy them and make them feel guilty. No worries, though. The money they’re going to make selling their photographs will probably buy a lot of Xanax.

That narrative, that attitude—they make me furious.

Because what you see in Hazelwood, in Braddock, in Detroit, in Gary, in South Bend? That’s not decay. Saying Rust Belt cities are decaying is like punching out someone’s front teeth and then saying that they have tooth decay. Decay is gradual. Decay is natural. Decay is more or less inevitable. None of these words apply to what’s happening to Rust Belt cities. Note that I didn’t say “what’s happened” or “in Rust Belt cities.” I didn’t say that because that’s not what I meant. It’s not done. It’s not over. It’s happening right now. Earlier, I referred to “disinvestment.” That’s the polite way that the business world has of referring to what bfp calls “neglect” and I’d call negligence and dereliction of duty. Rust Belt cities are not dying. They are being killed. Would you refer to someone who has cancer from industrial pollution as "decaying"?

In a lot of ways, reading people’s comments about their photography of Rust Belt cities is like playing a game of racist bingo or seeing a performance of the art of defending racism, as people pretend that poverty just happened without any apparent cause, or if there is a cause, it must be the fault of those who experience it. That’s what the narrative and the attitude pretend isn’t happening. They’re insisting that there is no care required, no duty, no responsibility. Piiparinen thinks that ruin porn is good because it “expose[s] the failure and decay,” a way of shifting the responsibility from the viewer back to the viewed; Leary describes "ruin photos" as "spectacles of degradation." This perception implies that these cities failed, that these buildings are decaying because of that failure, that exploiting that failure by taking photographs of it and selling them for money is somehow cleansing the city (and by proxy, its residents) of the shame it should feel for that failure.

And yet. I still don’t agree with bfp’s assessment that photographs of the impact of neglect in the Rust Belt are inherently and always exploitative without any potential positive effect. These are pictures that, whether they intend to or not, commemorate and illustrate the way that white privilege, capitalism, and classism combine as people try to justify engaging in a deliberate and unconscionable dereliction of duty while coining phrases like “financially distressed municipality” to refer to “areas that we aren’t going to bother caring about because the people there probably deserve it anyway—if they didn’t, they’d leave.” People taking these pictures are, more often than not, taking advantage of their own privilege to exploit these cities and the people who live in them…but the pictures they take still create a memorial of the wrongs that have been done.

Let me state this clearly: I believe that the buildings documented in most of these photos are beautiful. My house was built in 1910, and over the years, it's acquired more than its share of scars. For that matter, I have more than my share of scars, and many of them have dark memories behind them. But I wouldn't accept a claim from someone else that pictures of my scars are indications of failure or spectacles of degradation. No. That's the clear consequence of a narrative that blames the victim.

Where bfp and I differ is in how we believe that narrative can be resisted or rewritten.

I think part of that effort can lie in photography. In showing people pictures that say, “Look what we are doing to this city,” and to the people who live in it.* I don’t think it’s helpful to point to isolated examples, to gentrified neighborhoods inhabited by people who seem to think homelessness is some kind of disease caught only by those who deserve it, and focus on those alone as exemplifying what a city is. Those are only part of the story, but they’re the part that gets told all the time, every day, on every news station. This is America, and most people love bootstrapping success stories almost as much as they love stories about how poor people/neighborhoods/schools just needed the “right people” to come along and help them out. But telling only those stories at the expense of telling the narrative of negligence on the part of the government, the people, and the corporations who are hurting these cities and these people? No, thank you. Screw going gently into that good night.

And, in the end, these are pictures that show the Rust Belt cities I love. That’s why I take them. But it’s not why I post them. I’m posting them because I want you to see what I love, and I want you to see that the question of what the United States does about its negligence of these places and these people is not some kind of abstract ethics question of the sort that Kohlberg might pose. It is a very real question on the political table, and claiming that these cities are “disappearing” is a verbal sleight-of-hand that allows people to pretend the issue is already moot, that the story is already told, the book is already written.

It’s not.

Every time people move away from the "dangerous" city and out into the suburbs, every time they push for "neighborhood" shops so they don't have to leave their safe little subdivisions, it's another blow at the bricks in these crumbling walls. It’s another shove further down the ladder for the people who live there and the people who love there. This is not just scenery. This is not the Coliseum or the Acropolis. This is life right here right now. If it’s not your life, then you have all the more obligation to pay attention. To act.


* In her discussion of ruin porn, bfp points out that "The one thing [the pictures] have in common no matter who has taken them is that there are never any people in them. And to me, that points to the problem. There are no people interacting with the ruins." I understand this objection. To some extent, I agree with it. But I'm not sure the alternative is better. Making it the equivalent of street photography, where photographers take pictures of Rust Belt residents without permission or payment? That's where I think the label of pornography would become legitimate, and it would be forced performance in such pornography, at that. I assume that this isn't what bfp meant, and that she was suggesting that photographers would ask permission to photograph their subjects…but in addition to "that's not what most street photographers do," I have some serious concerns about this approach creating a this-is-a-zoo attitude—which is very much present in some of the photography that does exist that includes shots of people.

That said, I don't take pictures of people because: 1.) I'm deathly shy. Unless said strangers are holding an interesting book, wearing Steelers apparel, or in need of help, my attempts to initiate conversations with strangers result in a complete failure to vocalize anything. 2.) This gets into why I take pictures the way I do and of what I do, which is a whole other post, but in short: I take pictures to capture the world the way I see it, and I feel very uncomfortable with what feels like writing my own definition onto people I don't really know. Taking pictures of strangers feels like forcing intimacy between us, even with their permission.