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Selected Projects 20<strong>16</strong>-<strong>18</strong><br />
to suggest a place uncertain of its future” (Dunlap,<br />
2009). Martins’s photographs reference the concept<br />
of failure as he creates spaces that are almost ghost<br />
towns stuck in a “capitalist limbo” between “boomtown<br />
prosperity and quiet devastation” (Williams,<br />
2011). While analyzing Martins’s work, art historian<br />
Gilda Williams (2011) wrote, “So much human failure<br />
from the recent past is tied up with ruins.” She<br />
further argued that artists turned to ruins to lament<br />
the collapse of modernist ideas (Williams, 2011).<br />
The hopeful and booming future that modernism<br />
had ceaselessly moved towards had suddenly<br />
collapsed. With the disappearance of the promised<br />
future came a reversal of the concept of progress.<br />
No longer was life getting steadily better, and many<br />
people <strong>no</strong>w found themselves questioning the future<br />
they had always been certain of. Martins’s haunting<br />
photographs of buildings are interestingly timeless;<br />
they could have been abandoned minutes ago or<br />
decades ago. This immutability embodies the other<br />
perspectives, whether these ruins project our future<br />
or capture our past; they address a disappointment<br />
with our place in history.<br />
The final, and oft forgotten, perspective on photographic<br />
ruins is their problematic nature. Scholarship<br />
on the abstract nature of the ruin regularly<br />
neglects the fact that people still live in these areas.<br />
Though many fled to suburbia during the factories’<br />
prosperity, the areas surrounding the industrial<br />
buildings still held a large population. Camilo Jose<br />
Vergara addresses that in his photo series, “Fern<br />
174<br />
Stephen Shore. Holden St, North Adams, Massachusetts, 1974.<br />
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Screenshot<br />
from the personal website of the artist. Screen-shot<br />
taken from www.stephenshore.net/photographs/six/index.<br />
php?page=8&menu=photographs<br />
Edgar Martins, Untitled, Connecticut. From This Is Not a House<br />
Series, 2008. Screen-shot taken from Purdy Hicks Gallery’s<br />
website. Screen-shot taken from www.purdyhicks.com/display.<br />
php?aID=243#2. © Purdy Hicks Gallery, London
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