W10/11 Critical Thinking
- HildeMaassen
- Apr 7, 2019
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 16, 2020
Urban photography is a kind of photography that shows decay and nature takes over as is the subject of my photography
I myself made the first kind of “urban photography” during my bachelors in 1990 although the term was not yet invented as far as I know. With 2 other students I entered a vacant Belgian barracks where we took pictures. It gave a thrill and was exciting because we were in a forbidden place. I remember that I was mainly looking for the light visible on a broken door, three-legged table, shoe and sink or plant in the middle of the room made it come into its own. These were silent testimonies of the soldiers who were once stationed there. I photographed on slide, developed in reverse, very hip at the time and it might look, for an untrained eye, as the HDR images, these days often made in relation to the urban photography.
Last year I visited the ghost town "Doel". When you translatie the name of the town you would read "Target" or "Goal."
But what makes us so happy looking at decay or stand still in the event of an accident or fire while it often feels uncomfortable. Do we need the misery of others; do we need to see decline and ruins to realize how lucky we are and feel better for ourselves? Is it the feeling of being on prohibited ground, the trespassing? Is a substance created in our brains that make us feel good when we do that? Is it the copying behaviour or the search for a treasure that other people may not have found yet?
Dora Apel is professor of art history and visual culture at Wayne State University. She wrote a book Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline and I read an essay about the book on the site:
What I new as urban photography, the writer refers to as: deindustrial ruin imagery. She takes the way the city is shown in images of Detroit as the example. A standard trope in ruin imagery is the suggestion of a timeless struggle between nature and culture. Later in the article the photography is referred to as “ruin porn,” because of the voyeuristic and exploitative side of it.
By the way buildings are captures the photos are compared to and subscripted as:
Romanticized reveries on the struggle between nature and culture
Dead and mummified city
Wasteland
Aesthetic strategy
Romantic
Beautiful
Urban decline
Nightmare
Melancholic
Mismanaged city
War zone
Hurricane wreckage
The aftermath of a nuclear explosion
Irreversible decline
Mortal rigor
Picturesque
Beauty in decay
The article is about the role and the effects this genre of photography has on the people who still live in the city of Detroit and other cities who deal with same issues. It's about the negative way in which their living environment is portrayed and how politicians make decisions based on public opinion that is partly formed on the basis of the photos.The images seems to make it worse and they are actually angry with the photographers because of it. The photos arouse pity and compare them with the way children are depicted in Africa without food; at a distance.
The other angle is that, the imagery, the beauty of decay help us to cope with the terror.
It is important in the article how photography on the one hand has a historical function of capturing a phenomenon for posterity while on the other it can also cause damage to those who are "victims" of the fact that the lens is focused on them, or in this case on the environment in which they live and have to survive on a daily basis. In addition, partly due to the growing popularity of photography, the consequence is that these types of areas are given a kind of amusement values and attract disaster tourists and more images. Going to take images of the ruins becomes the alternativ for a day at an amusement park. People who do not live in the area, but only come from sensationalism, are called "outsiders".
The images also make people think about the problems and the search for solutions that are clearly needed. This is in most cases the intention of the early photographers who enter the scene. To let people and the politics see what is happening and think about how we can build cities that provide the basis for individual fulfilment, and help sustain the earth’s environment.
Photographers who are referred to in the article are Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
Quote from the photographers:
“RUINS ARE THE VISIBLE SYMBOLS AND LANDMARKS OF OUR SOCIETIES AND THEIR CHANGES, SMALL PIECES OF HISTORY IN SUSPENSION.”
On their website I can read a shortened history of the city of Detroit. The text ends with comparing the decay process with that of the decline of great empires such as the Pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens. A smart way to make the photos even more important by comparing them with age-old monumental and historically important buildings that have stood the test of time to the extent that we can still visit them today. Whether that also applies to the buildings of Detroit is of course entirely the question. I think it is highly unlikely.
Another photographer is Andrew Moore
In the articles I read about Moore, and a video, his work is placed in a with the wake of well-known painters from the 17th century, as well as with poems.
His photos are described as honest, documentary and metaphorical and as postacoplyptic scenes. Compared to visual poems, they are also seen as a continuation of a traditional history that began in the 17th century when countless artists used ruins to remind viewers of the fall of former great civilizations and to warn that contemporary empires risk the same fate. Although I personally think that photography has a much more direct impact because of the truthfulness that the medium of photography carries with it. Despite the fact that everyone is aware that it is very easy to manipulate, photogarfic images are seen as realistic.
The buildings as Moore depicts them are also compared to the monumentality of the engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesis from the 18th century that showfallen monuments from ancient Rome and Greece. Finally, they are told to be romantic and compared to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich from the 19th century.
He himself tells that the images are about time and they show what is, tragic, but with a glimmer of hope. In the video he also defends himself against criticism that is not expressed in it, by saying that he only follows the path of people who have already preceded him, broken in and destroyed everything and smeared it with graffiti.
People who visit the exhibition and whose opinion is asked in the video come with a whole lot of words and sentences. Some of them:
Metaphor of time
Nostalgic
Lost
Civilization and nature
Sublime-beautiful,
Poems about time
Epic history paintings
Outsider
Civilization is not for ever
Depressing and beautiful
Sad
Conflict
Poverty
One aspect, not everything
Reality we need to face
Lives, history,
Continuity
Decay that is renewing
New live out of old live
Uplifting
Have to be told story
What was, is en still can be
A crazy bit of surrealism
Is it a symbol of our times?
No restoring but looking forward
Feel the presents, the past, ghost like
Expend time from now, past and history
Process in time but and what happened
Romantic nature, drama, operatic, grandeur
Entertainment based on the misery of others
Process of history, preserved in photographs
Destroying our selves by destroying our cities
Opera in scale. Drama, tragic but with a glimmer of hope
As nature takes over; human versus nature, but nature is stronger
Very alone, rarely see anybody In the building, there are noises
Relation nature and man; what men creates and abundant by man is reclaimed by nature
People are important although not there in the images, we know they were there and by that are visible
My conclusion
It's hard to be a photographer in this world where, whatever you do, images are copied and people follow you to the same places. That way it's hard to be unique. I see that many photographers, such as Andrew Moore, choose to use a large camera, a way to try to maintain authentication. The popularity of the medium of photography in combination with the richness of social media has good, but also less pleasant qualities that can be mentioned, especially for disaster victims, such as what happened in Detroit. On the one hand, it can help to get attention in a situation where help is desperately needed and reporters, writing and visual, are welcomed with open arms, but the long-term consequences are harder to foresee. Although what is not the fault of those reporters in the longer term, they may be held responsible. What you can and must do as a photographer yourself is to always work with integrity. Try to illuminate the entire story while staying honest, no matter how difficult that sometimes is. The problem with urban photography is that it does not show the full story. We don’t see the people but only the remains, the buildings. We should not only try to tell the story that we want to tell about a place, but rather the story of the place and its people. Because you choose the medium of photography, people see what you show as the complete and trusted truth and with that you also write a piece of history with every photo you take.
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