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Undergraduate Research at UMass Dartmouth
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Joachim Koester (2010) shares this appreciation
for ruins as providing an awareness of our place in
history, allowing us to shape our future in “better and
surprising ways.” Of course, the difficultly here lies in
the ambiguity of the ruin. The same building can be
analyzed by one as a call to action and by another as
a call to return to the past. Koester speaks passionately
about his photographs of ruined buildings as
liminal spaces that incite change, but their ambiguity
lends itself to a multitude of interpretations, often
reflecting what the viewer wishes to see.
Another prominent perspective in the realm of
ruins photography is the ruin as prophetic. This lens
stretches back to the beginning of ruins scholarship
and specifically the popularity of Roman ruins in
art. Denis Diderot analyzed the interest in ruins in
the quote, “We contemplate the ravages of time,
and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the
very buildings in which we live over the ground; in
that moment solitude and silence prevail around
us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that
is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of
ruin.” (1995). The destruction of powerful buildings
of the past inspires the viewer to look prophetically
forward and predict the end of their own civilization,
reminded of the ephemerality of society. This
perspective is reflected in the work of Walker Evans
(2004) who encouraged artists to “Photograph the
present as it would be seen in the past.”
This sense of a forewarned future is very present
in Walker Evans’s cityscapes with their absence of
human presence and partly destroyed facades. The
city objectively existed during the period of factory-closings
in the 1960s and 1970s but it looks as if
it foretells a distant future, the future fall of our own
civilization. This element of the foreseen destruction
of a building is also a focus in the scholarship of
Robert Smithson (1996) who describes the phenomena
of the “ruins in reverse,” that “rise into ruin
before they are built.” Often, these reverse ruins are
in construction sites, projects begun during periods
of economic wealth and abandoned during slower
economic times. Inherent to Smithson’s ruins in
reverse is the concept of entropy, or that all things
increase towards chaos. Even in the process of
building, the ruins are prophesized and subsequently
inevitable. A similar analysis to Walker Evans’s work
can be made of Stephen Shore’s. Shore photographed
the American Northeast during the same period of
the factory closings. His works share that prophetic
emptiness, of a city vacant before its time. The closing
of factories did not just produce abandoned factories,
it created abandoned cities, empty of people and past
prosperity. With that incredibly permeable barrenness
came mixed feelings about the events that brought
the cities to their current state.
Reflecting on the situation of many Northeastern
cities after the closing of major businesses, many
artists and art historians turned to the ruin as a
sign of their disappointment. Edgar Martins, the
photographer of the photo series “Ruins of the
Second Gilded Age” (later called “This Is Not A
House”) described his photographed ruins in the
statement, “They deploy the metaphor of struggle
between poetic failures and the promise of success