Things Fall Apart: Modernity and Entropy

“Modernity and Entropy” is about the gradual recognition that the industrial and urban fabric of America was falling apart in the twentieth century, as cities aged and factory production moved out of cities like Detroit to manufacturing facilities outside the US. Philadelphia photographer Vincent Feldman has portrayed the decaying structures of his city, while Detroit’s ruins have been elaborately portrayed in the work of outsiders like Andrew Moore, Marchand and Meffre, and Camilo José Vergara. The chapter examines the various techniques and strategies photographers have developed, from the high aesthetic of Moore to the documentary time-lapse imagery of Vergara. America’s love affair with urban ruins is also examined here in the “Urban Exploration” movement and in the cinematic representation of urban ruin as futuristic dystopia.

Creative Destruction and Urban Space

This chapter focuses on the deliberate destruction of the city (“creative destruction”), clearing out older buildings to make way for newer, more profitable ones. Penn Station’s demolition is the most notorious example, and the chapter examines the way photographers represented its demise and how it ignited a new preservation movement. Life magazine carried the story of urban renewal through the post–World War II period, including its coverage of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, which came to symbolize the failures of government-subsidized housing. While creative destruction was considered a necessary cornerstone of capitalism, artists were critiquing the process in works of parody (Robert Smithson) and in the dramatic dismantling of buildings (Gordon Matta-Clark). The whole question of the “life cycle” of buildings and cities is considered, focusing on the work of Alan Berger in his theory of “drosscape” and in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of buildings with a fixed life.

Framing the Postmodern Waste Land

The “Postmodern Waste Land” explores the way mining operations and other industrial processes have affected the Earth’s surface, leaving scarred mountainsides, polluted rivers, and residual poisons that will remain in the earth for centuries. Superfund sites are the subject of David T. Hanson’s photographic surveys, while Edward Burtynsky has dramatized the way the wilderness has been destroyed through oil drilling and mining. The earlier history of ecological photography is covered as well, through a discussion of the opposing strategies of mid-twentieth century environmental photography—on one hand, the representation of the exploited landscape, and on the other hand the celebration of the natural world, as in photographs of Ansel Adams.

Conclusion

The conclusion of Empire of Ruins recalls the book’s examination of ruin photography as it relates to modernity—the traumas of war and climate change. But it places that narrative within a larger context by relating this theory of American ruins to a historical conjunction between ruins and revolution that has been visible in European history for centuries. Most notably, it is visible in Hubert Robert, who painted ruins during the French Revolution, and in Joseph Gandy, who depicted John Soane’s Bank of England as a future ruin, emerging from the financial crisis of the 1820s. Thomas Jefferson, during the American Revolution, had the same fear of future ruin that Thomas Cole had in his epic series, The Course of Empire, painted in the 1830s. And in the revolutionary moment of the Great Depression, Stephen Vincent Benét imagined—in a classic work of speculative fiction—a future world in which the ruins of the present world would be discovered. That same trope, recalling Doré’s New Zealander, is used by contemporary artist Ellen Harvey in her satiric sculptural installation, The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C. The book ends with a reflection on J. B. Jackson’s famous argument for the necessity of ruins and whether our present trajectory will allow us to begin again.

In Search of History

The first chapter explores how American intellectuals like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James imagined ruins in terms of European culture, holding them to be the mark of distinction. America’s lack of such ruins was a sign of our cultural impoverishment. They, and photographers like William James Stillman, were deeply attracted to classical ruins. Meanwhile, American explorers were discovering ancient ruins in the United States—like the remains of the Mound Builders civilization—and the ancient remains of Mayan civilization in the Yucatan. The picturing of these ruins radically changed the sense of how old the American continent was. At the same time, these American ruins were perceived through the screen of Old World ruins, as early explorers saw them in relation to Egyptian pyramids. The romance of Mayan ruins has long remained a magnet even for avant-garde artists like Robert Smithson, who traveled to Yucatan to engage in the ancient New World.

Picturing Climate Change: “It’s the Apocalypse”

Ecological awareness goes back at least to Henry David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, but it is only in the late twentieth century that a broader awareness emerged, centering on the effects of a changing climate on the Earth’s surface. The cataclysmic terror of Hurricane Katrina was most vividly photographed by Robert Polidori, among a dozen other New Orleans photographers, and his work is examined in this chapter. A different approach is taken by John Ganis, who has concentrated on the coastal regions of the East and Gulf states and has provided the perspective of a long-range view. Both photographers reveal the fragility of material structures, in which the movement from order to chaos can create shocking images of our disrupted environment. Yet another perspective is taken in the work of James Balog, whose time-lapse photographs and movies have disclosed the melting of polar glaciers at a speed that has startled scientists, even while it has confirmed the worst fears of climate change and the ruins it entails. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the way two popular climate movies by Roland Emmerich have imagined climate disaster, and the ambiguities of such representations.

Atomic War and the Destructive Sublime

This chapter on atomic ruins begins with a discussion of the bomb itself and the iconic form of the mushroom cloud, which quickly emerged from photographs of the explosion. The photography of nuclear war is considered in the work of Japanese photographers like Yamahata and Matsushige, whose horrifying images of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts eventually were shown in the pages of Life magazine after the ban was lifted. Edward Steichen’s celebrated Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art is considered in terms of the image of the hydrogen bomb and its later disappearance from the book version of the show. The post-atomic response of artists like Isozaki is examined, along with American photographers who pictured the Southwest US testing grounds in stunning photographs that explored ways of imaging the unimaginable. How beautiful was the bomb itself? Michael Light’s collection of imagery and related museum exhibitions have shown us the ambiguities of viewing the Destructive Sublime.

Pueblo Utopias

The chapter expands upon the “Romance of Ruins” by considering the meaning of Native American ruins and the impact they have had on the idea of “American” culture. Early explorers like William Henry Jackson, Frederick Chapin, and Gustaf Nordenskiöld photographed the civilizations of the Anasazi, including the cliff dwellers, for the first time, igniting great interest among the general public. Their discoveries appeared in the popular press and were presented at World Expositions, while novelists like Willa Cather incorporated the meaning of the Mesa Verde in fiction (e.g., The Professor’s House). Cather’s utopian view of pueblo culture is echoed in the work of early twentieth-century photographers like Laura Gilpin, who found in the ancient ruins of the Southwest and Central America, symbols of ideal civilization. Meanwhile, architect Mary Colter created ersatz ruins in the Grand Canyon National Park that would serve as emblems of the lost civilization and as tourist attractions.

Destroying Modernity: The World Trade Center

This chapter centers on the World Trade Center disaster and how its significance was interpreted through photographic imagery and the mass media. The spectacle of destruction has never been more vividly recorded than in the imagery of 9/11. The chapter discusses the work of two influential documentary photographers—James Nachtwey and Joel Meyerowitz—and what they were trying to achieve. But 9/11 photographs were also collected in two major archives that are discussed in the chapter—Here Is New York and the Library of Congress’s September 11 project—with their contrasting goals. The question of the “iconic” image is discussed in terms of the Falling Man photos, and the chapter concludes with a consideration of the extreme aestheticizing of the event in the remarks of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, which caused an uproar in Europe and the US.