So here we are at the ruin porn post! Ruin porn is not easy to talk about, especially not with those who collect it. And people outside the city that is a part of ruin porn rarely see the discussions around ruin porn as important. And yet those same people who turn away from “local” discussions all have a relationship with the ruin porn anyway.
What is ruin porn?
It’s hard to explain exactly, but in short simple terms, it’s the endless pictures of Detroit specifically, but also other post-industrial cities that focus on the blight, decay and abandonment of specific buildings. In broader terms, it’s very similar to other phenomenons that Feminists do know about and have an opinion on, things like poverty porn or even just porn itself. It is a fetishization. It is a camera trained with a hyper intense gaze on a subject. It is viewers getting off on the most vulnerable moments of the subject.
Like regular porn, there’s different grades of it. Some of it is very very good, like the picture by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre up there at the top. Others of it are more like this one (that I found here). 
Somebody with a camera throwing up any old thing. Knowing that it’s not the quality that counts. But the nakedness of the subject.
These pictures are largely taken by “outsiders”–that is: by people who aren’t from or don’t live in Detroit (or the Rust Belt city that is the subject of the picture). And for some reason, they seem to be a particular art choice by white hipsters, although people have been known to come from France and Norway to get some shots.
An entire industry is springing up around the pictures. Corporate media got in on the act, and people have made entire portfolios based on their ruin porn. And there’s something called urban exploration–where photographers sneak into old buildings and take pictures. People (ahem. white hipsters. ahem.) will often move to Detroit because of how much they love taking these “explorations”–and then get upset when people born in Detroit call them outsiders.
There are very few people born and invested in Detroit or the various Rust Belt cities that find these pictures appealing. Although, like regular porn, even if you don’t indulge, you can often understand the attraction that people have to these pictures. The well crafted ones are very well crafted. And the architecture of the time period these pictures usually focus on is glorious. It speaks of a time when, as annalouise says in comments:
All around Detroit are these gorgeous (and often empty) relics of the belief that public buildings for the working class should be beautiful, that ordinary people deserve to be in the presence of extraordinary beauty.
So, there is often something very compelling in these pictures. And yet, every new series or book showing the “dramatic” display of days long gone, I cringe. As does everyone I know. These pictures do show Detroit. But they don’t *represent* Detroit. They don’t make up what Detroiters love about Detroit. And they certainly don’t represent the real problems of Detroit. Or post-industrial cities.
And yet the photos actually claim to be a good representation of Detroit. Writers explaining the pictures tell us that the pictures are“documenting the dramatic decline of a major American city.” They assure us that:
Many of the images seem post-apocalyptic, as if some sudden catastrophe has struck downtown Detroit, forcing everyone to abandon homes and workplaces and flee the city.
And the pictures bear this out. The one thing they have in common no matter who has taken them is that there are never any people in them. And to me, that points to the problem. There are no people interacting with the ruins. The *reality* of Detroiters, is that everybody has to deal with these ruins (and we don’t call them ruins, we call it “blight,” or just regular old “abandoned houses”). Whether it’s because we live in the one house on an entire block that hasn’t been abandoned or because of outrageous insurance rates or because everywhere we go, we get astonished fear as a reaction when we say we’re from Detroit.
You’re from *there*? That war zone? That apocalyptic hell hole? That death trap?
But even more importantly, these pictures refuse to name *why* this decay is happening. Even as the lens is focused up close on “documentation” and “history,” it details exactly how the grandeur happened (the glorious era of Industrial Prosperity)–all while studiously ignoring the source of the decay (a weird sudden catastrophe!).
And yet, if you ask any Detroiter what is going on, they will point you immediately to the abandonment of the city by the factories. I am from Flint, and so my city’s story can easily be pointed to with Michael Moore’s Roger and Me. As Roger and Me shows–the story of Detroit and Flint are intimately intertwined. All the factory cities on the I-75 corridor share the same history. Things were horrible until the unions came. The unions forced the industries in this area to have some modicum of accountability to the people working for them. The cities then reflected the brilliance of that accountability through (among other things) the architecture that was meant to please even the eyes of poor people. And then the corporations found a way to not be accountable any more. Whether it was through NAFTA or Reagon’s tax breaks, or deregulation or globalization or all of it together–the corporations started leaving. And everything went to hell.
What these pictures reflect are not some random unexplainable moment of God striking down city after city that just so happen to only be located in the Rust Belt–they don’t even reflect decay. They reflect *neglect*. And *neglect* is an action that requires someone to be doing the neglecting. Unfortunatly, ruin porn very rarely inspires people to ask “who is doing this neglecting?” and when they do ask that–they draw on white supremacist heteropatriarhal narratives that position black people at the crux of all that is negative. It was *black* people that did this. Because Detroit is the Murder Capital! And they don’t take care of their houses! And all the city council is corrupt! And everybody knows that house values go down when they move in!
But as I talked about previously, when you know the true history of an area, you can begin to see the truth more clearly. You notice things like: the house values go down because the government has a policy that forces them to. Or that if we’re all busy blaming the corrupt city officials, we don’t notice that the factory just left town. And if we blame the corruption of the city officials on their blackness, we forget to see that it was the unnatural relationship between the corporations and the government that made the corrupt rules to begin with. Or: when you know the historical reality of an area, then you can see more clearly that pictures like ruin porn don’t reflect the city–they reflect the violence done to a city.
Some thoughts:
* Globalization is another word for corporate lack of accountability. Post-industrialization is a symptom of lack of accountability. Ruin porn is type of media narrative that allows people to believe that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with corporate lack of accountability.
* As mentioned previously, Rust Belt towns like Detroit and Flint were built with the specific intention of mobilizing resources for corporations. Their foundations were built on lack of accountability, as the corporations that supported them needed them to be.
This is a very real, practical problem. And it is what unions were ultimately in resistance of. Having nowhere to turn to because the company owned the newspapers, the police, the school board, the city council, etc. Violent white supremacists can make their inroads so effectively in local politics because in Rust Belt towns local was built with the intention of minimum oversight.
* Which is why organizing that is grounded in long term reimagining of new types of economies is essential rather than “not practical,” or “not realistic,” or “a dream.” I’ve heard so often the “Yeah, like that’s going to happen” accompanied with the rolling of the eyes when talking about stuff like “building new worlds” or “transformative change.” Or I get the “what are you, a commie?” or an impassioned “reasonable” argument about why capitalism may not work well, but it’s the best thing we have.
But if you set these arguments within the way we fetishize the withdrawal of resources–the way we admire and elegantly frame the violence of neglect, it becomes more obvious that “practicality” and “realistic” and “reasonable” are values of the same white supremacist heteropatriarchy that uses white supremacy to make globalization, free trade agreements and etc make sense. These are not values that have sprung out of the needs of the communities we live in.
Which means that we have a lot of questions to ask ourselves.
* What *are* our values?
* What would the values of a new economic system look like?
* What would an economic system that valued, for example, non-violence look like? Would it be a single economy?
* What would economies that valued ambiguity, flexibility, fluidness rather than rigidity, control and border enforcement look like?
* What does it mean to be a business that is accountable to community? What do apparatuses of accountability *look* like in this situation?
Again, these are not the questions of starry eyed dreamers in the Rust Belt region. They are practical questions that center the experiences of people who are required to interact with the violence of ruin porn every single day. And indeed, if you look closely throughout the Rust Belt, you see these very practical questions being shaped into a new reality. You see whole communities teaching each other how create and distribute accountable media. You see whole communities building new ways to feed each other. You see whole communities where youth are leaders in organizing new ways of learning. And you see whole communities healing together.
Practical solutions to a devastating problem.
Detroit, Flint, Saginaw, Willow Run, Cleveland, Toledo, Philadelphia etc etc etc…these cities are not *ruined*. They are survivors. They are living and breathing entities that have to figure out what to do now…just like all of us do.
Ruin porn may be pretty some times. But it doesn’t represent the cities they picture. And they don’t show what is important: the communities and people who are accountable to each other building a new world. Together.