viz.

Image Credit:  Vice Magazine

I couldn’t resist covering this piece that Tim brought to my attention.  NPR did a segment covering the evolving phenomenon of “ruin porn” by interviewing a writer, Thomas Morton, who wrote an attack on this phenomenon for Vice Magazine.  Morton argues against these images because he says they mislead audiences about the actual economic state of Detroit.

I think Morton makes a really interesting point about the nature of visual rhetoric, and how easily it can be abused, to his interviewer, Bob Garfield, in the NPR piece:  “I think when you’re presented with a photo and then a little bit of description of it, the image stands so strongly that it’s almost hard to argue it; you’re throwing what seem like minor quibbles at this shot of utter desolation.”  He’s specifically addressing photographers illustrating stories about contemporary urban blight with photos of buildings abandoned in the 1950s, but he also raises the larger ethics of photographing urban blight for aesthetic purposes.

When pictures like these from Vice Magazine, which are included in a story about abandoned schools in Detroit, work to argue for the reader to move beyond the pictures to agitate on behalf of Detroit’s schoolchildren, this seems to be non-exploitative.  Morton points at articles and photo series like these from Time Magazine as examples of stories that edit out positive developments in favor of focusing on the bad.  However, this isn't the only example of the phenomenon.  Websites like Abandoned focus on ruined buildings exclusively for aesthetic purposes.  What are the ethics of enjoying looking at ruins for the sake of looking at ruins?

I’m particularly interested in this question as a student of eighteenth-century British literature, as ruins came up again and again as a trope for arguments about lost religious values (focusing on ruined abbeys), and for arguments about rural redevelopment as discussed in Raymond Williams’ Country and the City (epitomized by Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770 poem, “The Deserted Village”), but also as a trope for aesthetic enjoyment.  Lord Elgin argued that he had the right to take the Elgin Marbles to Britain because Greece could not care for them appropriately, but this was at the service of cultural appropriation.  Ruins seem to serve certain cultural purposes both in England and America today, but for what ends?