ruin porn tourism

one of the few signs of decay i've seen in denmark

i love a good ruin...falling down buildings in decay are so picturesque and evocative. some of my most powerful imaginings have been at ruins...whether it's standing on the plains at troy and almost being able to catch the sounds of battle on the wind or walking along the paved streets of ephesus at midday and imagining john the baptist and paul (misogynist tho' he was) treading there before me or whether it's the old house down on the creek where my father spent his early childhood. ruins evoke memory and emotions and are haunting somehow. and even more haunting if the pictures of them are without people - making the building or place seem that much more abandoned. there is a lot of emotion in such photos of decay.

what does it take for there to be decayed buildings in a landscape? time, for one. the ancient ruins dotting turkey, greece and the balkans, with the odd column sticking up in a field here and there, are just part of the landscape - the history of the place, as the sands of time pass relentlessly over it. on the prairies, it's a sign of the consolidation of all those small family farms into big corporate farms. and there's simply not enough people out there to be living on all of those little homesteads anymore, so some of them fall into picturesque ruin as they bake in the summer sun and are exposed to harsh winters.

somewhere near stickney, south dakota

i miss a good ruin in my daily life. denmark is too prosperous, too middle class, too neat, and perhaps simply too small to allow ruins to stand. one of my favorite exceptions is the old windmill above. but i wonder how long it will be allowed to stand in decay. it's probably violating some or other municipal ordinance in all of its shabby glory.

i feel like i'm hearing an awful lot about detroit lately. it seems it's become the archetype of an american city in decline. famous photographers take haunting peopleless photographs of its once grand buildings in ruin. and those photos are extremely moving. when i see them, it makes me want to go to detroit as a ruin porn tourist.  i recently saw some photos of an abandoned complex near berlin that made me feel the same way. but what are the implications of such voyeuristic practice? being a visitor to a contemporary ruin seems much more somehow violating than visiting ephesus or pergamon or the acropolis. it's so much closer and more raw. many of the buildings in detroit were still in use up to the early 90s, so the wound is quite fresh in a way. and is making a photographic essay of those once glorious buildings, empty of people, doing detroit a disservice?  the new republic thinks so. and so do the people who made this documentary.

what do you think?