Ruin lust/Ruin porn?: What ‘ruin porn’ tells us about ruins – and porn

Summary

Ah, porn. Few words come with as many pre-loaded connotations and assumptions – the promise of titillation, the thrill of taboo, the inherent air of seediness. Think poverty porn. Think food porn. Think good-old fashioned porn-porn.

So what are we to make of ‘ruin porn’, the work of photographers and artists who aim to communicate the romantic frisson – as they see it – of run-down buildings? The term has cropped up with increasing regularity in the last few years. The ruins of Chernobyl, the Holocaust, Detroit's urban decay, and even abandoned amusement parks have become havens for ‘ruin photographers’. In his recent book The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015), US theorist Brian McHale claims that artist Robert Smithson's work acts as a precursor to ruin porn. He argues that the photographic documentation of ruin ‘arguably begins with Smithson's deadpan photographs of modern industrial wastelands in his conceptualart project A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. This, he argues, has since proliferated into ‘an abundant photographic record of urban decay and ruin in the wake of the deindustrialisation of North American “Rust Belt” cities’. These ruins, he notes, are self-inflicted, rather than the result of warfare and international conflict, as with 9/11. The fascination with Detroit's urban decay is the direct result of economic failure, specifically the downturn of the motor industry in the 1970s. Its ruins have since been the subject of much obsession, including numerous articles, photographic essays and online galleries.

The allure of ruin remains prominent in tourism and popular culture, including abandoned amusement parks such as Sydney's Magic Kingdom park, Germany's Cold War-era Spreepark, and Japan's Takakanonuma Greenland in the Fukushima district. Photographers who capture these sites have a name, ‘urban explorers’, and many keep diaries of their discoveries on social media platforms. These images represent not only economic failure, but ideological failure, representing a break with modernised conceptions of cultural innocence and everyday enjoyment.

The term ‘ruin porn’ has been met with great criticism for its exploitative nature and use in trivialising the causes of destruction and urban decay. In 2013, art critic Richard B. Woodward argued that: ‘Ruin Porn is a phrase so immature and gawky it isn't sure how seriously to take itself.