Arnold, Sarah
(2015)
Urban Decay Photography and
Film: Fetishism and the Apocalyptic
Imagination.
Journal of Urban History, 41 (2).
pp. 326-339.
ISSN 0096-1442
Abstract
Detroit’s perceived social and industrial degeneration has been matched by an unfortunate
aesthetic appreciation for the image of urban ruination. Detroit, and other cities experiencing
economic disinvestment, have become the inanimate models for a documentary and artistic
mode of photography that fetishizes scenes of urban decline and abandonment. Such cities and
urban spaces have become real-life stand-ins for the apocalyptic imagination already nurtured
in broader arts and media. The fascination with the ruins of contemporary culture and the
proliferation of what is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn” photography, point toward Susan
Sontag’s cautious warning about the photographer’s complicity in retaining the photographed
object’s state of being. Drawing on Sontag’s suspicions of photography, I offer a critique of the
function and meaning of ruin photography. I draw on both Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s cautions
about the interpretive function of the photograph in terms of the act of photographing the object
as well as the meaning that the photograph proposes. Using this framework, I consider the
recent conceptualizations of ruin, particularly the industrial ruin, as ambivalent and multifaceted.
I question whether this multidimensionality is evident in the ruin photography of Yves Marchand
and Romain Meffre and others, the urban exploration photography of Detroiturbex, and the
documentary film Deptropia. I suggest that the photographer’s fascination with places of ruin
carries out the double act of fixing such places firmly in a particular melancholic moment and
equally fixes any potential meaning potentially represented in such imagery.
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