Detroit Research Volume 1

195
metanarratives as a primary task of the
negative. In John Patrick Leary’s essay
“Detroitism,” arguably the best formulation
of the “ruin porn” critique, we find:
“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” 5 . Metanarratives of progress,
origins, and transformation are defended
here as opposed to forms of aesthetic
denial: romantic rebel lion, theatricality,
and aestheticization. If the two forms of
positivism seem inadvertently close,
Nietzsche’s “monumental history” explains the ruins’
betrayal of hope and their cri tique.
To begin with, there is no one-sized-fits-all
aesthetic practice of ruin photography; we must
look within the formal values of the photographic
image and out toward a range of visual discourses
of the ruin. In putting the case for the aesthetics of
denial in “ruin porn,” Leary cites an egregious example
of image exploitation and narrative excess
in the following:
British filmmaker Julien Temple’s documentary, Requiem
for Detroit, and his ac companying Guardian
essay, “Detroit: The Last Days,” are the quintessence
of the Detroit Lament. “Approaching the derelict shell
of downtown Detroit,” Temple breathlessly writes, “we
see full-grown trees sprouting from the tops of deserted
skyscrapers. In their shadows, the glazed eyes of the
street zombies slide into view, stumbling in front of the
car. Our excitement at driving into what feels like a manmade
hurricane Katrina is matched only by sheer disbelief
that what was once the fourth-largest city in the U.S.
could actually be in the process of disappearing from
the face of the earth.” This is the style denounced locally
as “ruin porn.” All the el ements are here: the exuberant
connoisseurship of dereliction; the unembarrassed
rejoicing at the “excitement” of it all, hastily balanced by
the liberal posturing of sympathy for a “man-made Katrina,”
and most importantly, the absence of people other
than those he calls, cruelly, “street zombies.” The city is
a shell, and so are the people who occasionally stumble
into the photographer’s viewfinder. [“Detroitism”]
"Many of the classrooms look like class just got out. Posters and paintings
still cling to the walls, and supplies still fill cabinets..."
Leary is right to attack this mystificatory fantasy,
easily recognizable as a cultural cliché; we may
say that it is in monumental bad taste, like the
monuments it fetishizes. Hack neyed imagery and
purple prose evidence the first reactions of the
new visitor to Detroit, but this is by no means adequate
for the genre of ruin photography. Canadian
photogra pher Stan Douglas’s series Le Détroit (Art
Gallery of Windsor, 1999) explored Detroit through
a range of conceptual, site-specific, and installation
strategies, none of which are reducible to the
image. Conceptual distance, within the image, creates
an iconographic allegory of part and whole,
while the ensemble of images was exhibited, along
with a film projection, as a critical investigation akin
to Douglas’s many site-specific projects in urban
and rural Vancouver. The local reaction, however,
could not have been more negative: Douglas
was portrayed as a moneyed outsider (Toronto finance
capital) trading on lived experience for lucre;
clearly, Detroit’s self-understanding had not come
to terms with ar tistic practices such as conceptual
photography or installation and site-specific art
as providing mediating frameworks for interpretation.
On the other hand, Dan Austin and Sean Doerr’s
Lost Detroit (2010) offers nar rative contexts
for its investigation into a dozen iconic sites, from
the Broderick Towers and Cass Tech to Michigan
Central Station (after Camilo Vergara’s beforeand-after
se quences in American Ruins [1999]). 6
Image originally printed in Lost Detroit, 30. Reprinted courtesy of Dan Austin and Sean Doerr/SNWEB.ORG