Beauty and the east: allure and exploitation in post-Soviet ruin photography
▻http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/2950/russian-ruins-photography
“As new book Soviet Ghosts shows, everyone loves an artfully shot post-communist ruin. But, asks Jamie Rann, what does this say about us — and about Russia?
what Soviet Ghosts represents: the marriage of trendy post-industrial “ruin porn” with the on-going “othering” of Russia and eastern Europe. Why is it that glossy pictures of dishabilles sanatoriums and explicitly exposed rocket bases have become so popular, and why has the former Soviet Union become a centre for the international ruin industry?
The particular form this nemesis took, for the most part, was rapid deindustrialisation. Outside east Asia, the 20th century probably marked the zenith of the production economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the one competitor in the 21st-century ruin market that — despite their exoticism and militaristic chic — the far-flung corners of Terra Sovietica must cede too: Detroit.
For SLR-toting entropy enthusiasts, the echoing atriums of Motor City are much more accessible than remote Red Army emplacements or irradiated ghost towns — hence the celebrity status of its disrepair. But Detroit’s popularity in this regard has also made it the first site of resistance to ruin fetishism and its pornographic modus operandi: such photographs are rightly criticised for the way in which they reduce, aestheticise and dehumanise the city, rendering architectural form naked and inhuman — a parallel to the way in which pornography objectifies the female body. In both instances, we are at once beguiled and reviled by the image, which combines beauty and destruction, worship and shaming. ..”
Detroitism
▻http://www.guernicamag.com/features/leary_1_15_11