Ruin Porn Reprise

Hyperallergic contributor Kyle Chayka posting about a recent edition of WNYC's Studio 360 that addresses the recent cultural meme of 'ruin porn'...

In the apex of our era of high-flying capitalism, Detroit ruin porn functions as just such a momento mori, a call to remember that the same fate as Motor City could befall all of our great cities, all of our unstable accomplishments. I think Detroit ruin porn is so popular, and such a well-traveled visual avenue, in part because we want to be reminded that it could all fail. The voyeurism isn't just gawking at the old buildings; it's gawking at the possibility and the danger of death.

Which more or less covers my own thoughts on the topic some time ago; as well as echoing what Dylan Trigg, a number of Urb Ex-ers, and anyone who's ever given the matter a little bit of contextual thought might've said on the matter, as well.

And it seems this is the meme that's going to keep giving for a while, because Sean O'Hagan also had a piece on the topic in the Guardian a couple weeks ago, specifically about the noted Detroit work of photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and their book The Ruins of Detroit. O'Hagan provides a bit of pertinent background info about the duo:

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographs together since they first met in 2002. They are both children of Paris's banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city. Without formal training, they describe themselves as 'autodidacts who share an obsession with ruins', which, says Meffre, 'allow you to appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back from there'.

Having photographed old buildings -- 'mainly disused theatres' -- in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. 'It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,' says Meffre, 'but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.'

All of which mean, I suppose, that we'll continue to hear more on the topic in the future. Perhaps at some point there'll be some international academic symposium at some point, one involving a call for papers from scholars from a variety of disciplines (cultural studies, sociology, urban studies, art and architectural history, philosophy, etc.), with a published collection of the contributions appearing after the fact.