Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay

Siobhan Lyons
Editor

Ruin Porn and the

Obsession with Decay
Editor
Siobhan Lyons
Department of Media, Music,
Communication and Cultural
Studies
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-93389-4 ISBN 978-3-319-93390-0  (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93390-0

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v
 Acknowledgements

This work is the result of the time and efforts of a number of people,
without whom the book would not come to fruition. First, I would
like to acknowledge the contributors of this volume, whose work and
enthusiasm for the book has made the entire project worthwhile; I wish
to thank them for their generous time and efforts in contributing to
this volume. I also wish to acknowledge Shaun Vigil, whose continued
patience and guidance through the process have been incredibly helpful,
and whose support has been very much appreciated. My sincere thanks
also goes to Glenn Ramirez for his work on getting the book to publi-
cation, and his patience throughout the editing process. I would like to
offer my sincere gratitude to the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their
assistance and support with this book, from start to finish. And finally, as
always, a huge thank you to my parents Fran and Patrick, whose contin-
ued support makes this work possible.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the

Anthropocene 1
Siobhan Lyons

Part I  American Ruin

2 Detroit Was Always Made of Wheels: Confronting Ruin

Porn in Its Hometown 13
Kate Wells

3 Gods and Monsters: A Solastalgic Examination of

Detroit’s Ruins and Representation 31
Christopher T. Gullen

4 The Bronx Isn’t Burning, Is It?: Ruin Porn and

Contemporary Perceptions of The Bronx 45
Joseph Donica

ix
x    Contents

Part II  Photographic Ruin

5 “Take Nothing But Photos, Leave Nothing But

Footprints”: How-to Guides for Ruin Photography 83
Susan A. Crane

6 Where the (Moving) Sidewalk Ends: Images of Wasted

Americana in the Pre-apocalyptic World 103
Amanda Firestone, Stephen Crompton and Corey George

7 Picturing Ruin in the American Rustbelt: Andrew

Borowiec’s Cleveland: The Flats, the Mill, and the Hills 119
Susann Köhler

Part III  Alternative Ruinscapes

8 Diachronic Fetishisation: Ruin Porn and Pitcairn Island

Language, Archaeology, and Architecture 137
Joshua Nash and Martin Gibbs

9 No Vacancy: History and Meaning of Contemporary

Ruins in a Regional Australian City 155
Nancy Cushing, Michael Kilmister and Nathan Scott

Part IV  Virtual and Mediated Ruin

10 Immersive Ruin: Chernobyl and Virtual Decay 181

Michelle Bentley

11 More Than Ruins: (Post-)Apocalyptic Places in Media 201

Felix Kirschbacher
 Contents    xi

12 “This Is Not Ruin Tourism”: Social Media

and the Quest for Authenticity in Urban Exploration 217
André Jansson

Erratum to: Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay E1

Siobhan Lyons

Index 235
 Notes on Contributors

Michelle Bentley is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and

Director of the Centre of International Public Policy at Royal Holloway,
University of London. Her research specializes in representations of
mass killing (particularly WMD), strategic narratives, securitization, and
US foreign policy. She has written two sole-authored books: Weapons of
Mass Destruction and US Foreign Policy: The Strategic Use of a Concept
(Routledge, 2014) and Syria and the Chemical Weapons Taboo: Exploiting
the Forbidden (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Susan A. Crane  is Associate Professor of Modern European History at
the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on thematic issues of col-
lective memory, historical consciousness and historical photography. She
is author of Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-
Century Germany (2000) and editor of Museums and Memory (2000).
She is editing The Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century
and completing a monograph, “...and then Nothing Happened”: On
Seeing the Past as Nothing.
Stephen Crompton is a British filmmaker and photographer whose
work explores the American-made landscape. His work has been featured
in festivals and exhibitions in the United states and abroad, including the

xiii
xiv    Notes on Contributors

Sarasota Film Festival, Dallas VideoFest, the Virginia Film Festival, Indie
Grits, Athens Film and Video Festival, and the Insight Festival. He cur-
rently teaches Film Production at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Nancy Cushing is an Associate Professor based in the History dis-
cipline at University of Newcastle, Australia. She works in the areas of
heritage, regional, and environmental history having co-written or edited
Snake-bitten, Eric Worrell and the Australian Reptile Park (UNSW Press,
2010), Radical Newcastle (NewSouth Press, 2015), Smoky City (Hunter
Press, 2015), and Animals Count (Routledge, 2018). She is an active
member of the historical profession, convening the Australian and New
Zealand Environmental History Network and serving on the History
Council of New South Wales’ executive council.
Joseph Donica  is an assistant professor of English at Bronx Community
College of the City University of New York. He teaches American lit-
erature, literary criticism and theory, and writing courses. He has pub-
lished articles and reviews on American architecture, 9/11 literature,
Edward P. Jones, Arab-American literature, Netflix and the digital future,
the politics of the Internet, Hurricane Katrina memoirs, and disabil-
ity studies. He is also a contributor to the Sage Encyclopaedia of War
as well as the Website American Muslims: History, Culture, and Politics.
His latest articles are “Rethinking Utopia for the Twenty-First Century:
The Good Life after Occupy and the Arab Spring,” “Negative Memory
after Katrina: The Persistence of Memoir,” “The Erosion of the Cultural
Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism,” “Not
All Roads Lead to Rome: The State of the Humanities at Community
Colleges,” and “Is Computer Code Queer?” His article on every-
day life in Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War is forthcom-
ing in College Literature. He is co-editing a collection of essays titled
Reflections on a Changing Profession: The Future of the English
Ph.D. and writing his first monograph titled Inequality’s Subjects:
Neoliberalism and American Literature after Occupy Wall Street and the
Arab Spring. He currently serves on the executive board of the Rocky
Mountain Modern Language Association, and he is the chair of the com-
mittee awarding the John Leo and Dana Heller Award in LGBTQ stud-
ies through the Popular Culture Association.
Amanda Firestone is Assistant Professor of Communication at The
University of Tampa. She teaches media studies and often includes
 Notes on Contributors    xv

themes of apocalypse and monstrosity to make classes more accessible

(and exciting!) for students. Recently she co-edited the scholarly collec-
tion Harry Potter and Convergence Culture: Essays on Fandom and the
Expanding Potterverse with Leisa A. Clark and The Last Midnight: Essays
on Apocalyptic Narratives in Millennial Media also with Clark and Mary
F. Pharr. Amanda enjoys knitting, sewing, baking, and drinking margari-
tas—all in preparation for The End of Times.
Martin Gibbs is Convenor of Archaeology at the University of
Newcastle. His research interests are in the historical and maritime
archaeologies of the Australia-Pacific region. He is Chief Investigator
on Beyond the New World: A sixteenth-century Spanish colony and
its impact on indigenous populations in the Solomon Islands. Gibbs
and Duncan have published a book: Please God Send Me a Wreck: The
Archaeology of a Community’s Responses to Shipwreck, Plenum/Springer
Press, 2015. He is also working on convict archaeology in New South
Wales, Port Arthur in Tasmania and Norfolk Island. Gibbs is a member
of the Archaeology of Sydney Research Group to improve public out-
puts. This includes an archive: NSW Archaeology Online.
Corey George grew up on his grandparents’ farm in upstate South
Carolina, surrounded by farmers, old pine forests, wildlife, and Southern
Democrats. His current work is a study of the rural landscape of the
southern USA, and it documents how man has shaped and altered it over
the past few decades. The pursuit of progress often spearheads man’s
desire to mould the land, yet the land perseveres and eventually reclaims
its place. George photographs these sites of mutual destruction and crea-
tion. He currently teaches at The University of Tampa.
Christopher T. Gullen is Assistant Professor of Communication at
Westfield State University in Westfield, Massachusetts. He teaches
courses in Mass Communication, Film Studies, and Social Media. Dr.
Gullen’s primary research interests focus on film and television, new
media and digital culture, and pornography. His film work revolves
around the representation of gender and he enjoys international travel
and cooking.
André Jansson is Professor of media and communication studies
and director of the Geomedia Research Group at Karlstad University,
Sweden. His most recent monographs are Mediatization and Mobile
Lives: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2018) and Cosmopolitanism
xvi    Notes on Contributors

and the Media: Cartographies of Change (with M. Christensen, Palgrave

Macmillan, 2015). He has published widely in journals like Annals of
Tourism Research, Communication Theory, European Journal of Cultural
Studies, New Media and Society, and Urban Studies.
Michael Kilmister is a Ph.D. candidate in History and an academic
writing adviser at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research
explores the significance of the British Empire in Australian foreign pol-
icy and politics, the teaching-research nexus, and liminal spaces in local
histories. He has published in History Compass and The Conversation.
Felix Kirschbacher is Director of studies for economics, ethics, and
media at the Protestant Academy of the Palatinate. He studied Film
Studies, French, and Protestant Theology in Mainz and is currently
finishing his doctoral thesis on “Post-Apocalypse in Films and Series”.
His research interests also include film theory, audiovisual seriality, and
(US-American) television history.
Susann Köhler is lecturer in American Studies at the University of
Göttingen, Germany. In her dissertation project, she examines rep-
resentations of US-American postindustrial cities in photography
books and analyzes the sociocultural legacy of deindustrialisation in the
American Midwest and Northeast. Her research focuses on the history of
industrial photography, conceptualisations of ruin, theories of the urban,
and cultural memory.
Siobhan Lyons is lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University,
Sydney, Australia. Her book Death and the Machine: Intersections of
Mortality and Robotics (Palgrave Pivot) was published in 2018. She has
contributed chapters to Philosophical Approaches to the Devil (Routledge,
2016), Westworld and Philosophy (Wiley, 2018), and Understanding
Nietzsche, Understanding Modernisms (Bloomsbury, 2018). Her work
has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, New
Philosopher, Philosophy Now, Overland, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, as
well as in academic journals including Continuum: Journal of Media and
Cultural Studies, Media International Australia, and Celebrity Studies.
Joshua Nash is an islophilic generalist. He has conducted linguistic
fieldwork on Pitcairn Island and Norfolk Island, South Pacific, Kangaroo
Island, South Australia, and New Zealand, environmental and ethno-
graphic fieldwork in Vrindavan, India, and architectural research in
 Notes on Contributors    xvii

outback Australia. He is concerned with philosophical and ontological

foundations of language and place.
Nathan Scott is a lecturer in Music in the School of Creative Arts at
the University of Newcastle. He has interdisciplinary research interests
across areas of creative arts, technology, and science and has a wealth of
experience across many genres of music including recording commercial
releases. He has collaborated with the ABC on live national radio broad-
casts and was the telematic manager for the International Space Time
Concerto Competition (2012) as well as being involved in collaborative
electroacoustic performances/installations at the Newcastle Region Art
Gallery (2009) and The Lock-Up Gallery (2011).
Kate Wells hails from Detroit, Michigan and is a Ph.D. candidate in
the Social and Political thought program at York University. She has an
MA in Cultural History from University of London, Queen Mary and
a BA from Colgate University in New York. In her time at York she
has worked with collaborative research projects such as LOT and the
Visible City Project and Archive, seeking creative approaches to under-
standing today’s urban situation. She is interested in the intersections of
race, space, and place and the role that history and culture play in the
construction of urban mythologies. Her published article “Ancestral
Irrepressible: McLuhan, Derrida and the Future of the Archive” in the
Flusser Studies online journal deals with how history and critical theory
can illuminate the spatial.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Abandoned Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, Michigan 32

Fig. 4.1 “Abandoned Home 1970s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 66
Fig. 4.2 “Shakespeare Ave. 1970s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 66
Fig. 4.3 “Burned out Buildings 150th St. 1970s”
(Photograph courtesy of Georgeen Comerford) 67
Fig. 4.4 “East 155th St. 1970s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 68
Fig. 4.5 “Looking for a Robber—Police on Rooftops 1980s”
(Photograph courtesy of Georgeen Comerford) 69
Fig. 4.6 “South Bronx 1970s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 69
Fig. 4.7 “@155th St. 1980s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 70
Fig. 4.8 “Melrose Avenue 1970s” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 71
Fig. 4.9 “The Other Park Avenue—Bronx @ 153 Street
1970s” (Photograph courtesy of Georgeen Comerford) 72
Fig. 4.10 “Broken Mailboxes 1975” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 73
Fig. 4.11 “Ironic Sign—161st St. & Jerome Ave. 1985”
(Photograph courtesy of Georgeen Comerford) 74
Fig. 4.12 “Election Posters Nov 1976” (Photograph courtesy
of Georgeen Comerford) 75

xix
xx    List of Figures

Fig. 4.13 “Abandoned Car—Cross BX Expressway 1972”

(Photograph courtesy of Georgeen Comerford) 75
Fig. 5.1 At the threshold of an abandoned Chernobyl cottage.
Photo by Kate Brown 96
Fig. 5.2 Todd Sipes, “Caught in a Web” 97
Fig. 5.3 A desk chair stands in a former waterpark in the Mojave
desert in southern California. Untitled (2011). Photo by
Tong Lam, Abandoned Futures, n.p. 98
Fig. 6.1 “Woodville Mall #1” (2001) (Courtesy of Stephen
Crompton) 110
Fig. 6.2 “Honduras,” 2011 (Courtesy of Corey George) 115
Fig. 7.1 “From the roof of Cargill Salt Mine, Whiskey Island, 2002”
(Courtesy of Andrew Borowiec) 124
Fig. 7.2 “Steam plant, ISG mill, 2002” (Courtesy
of Andrew Borowiec) 128
Fig. 7.3 “Holmden Avenue, Tremont, 2003” (Courtesy
of Andrew Borowiec) 130
Fig. 8.1 A Pitcairn Island house being dismantled in April 1998
(Courtesy of Martin Gibbs) 140
Fig. 8.2 Thursday October Christian’s house in 1935
(https://theroguephotographer.smugmug.com/
History/History-of-Pitcairn-in-photos/i-LZ2CkxN/A) 143
Fig. 8.3 Thursday October Christian’s house in May 1998
(Courtesy of Martin Gibbs) 144
Fig. 8.4 Signage commemorating the site of Thursday October
Christian’s house in June 2016 (Courtesy of Joshua Nash) 144
Fig. 8.5 Elevation of Nola’s old house in May 1998 (Courtesy
of Martin Gibbs) 146
Fig. 8.6 Remains of Nola’s old house in June 2016 (Courtesy
of Joshua Nash) 147
Fig. 8.7 Nash in conversation about the Pitcairn language with
Nola Warren in Nola’s newer house, July 2016 (Video
still courtesy of Joshua Nash) 149
Fig. 9.1 The Frogy’s building, showing the second version
of the decorative hoardings and its roofless state after
asbestos removal (Source Nathan Scott, 20 October 2016) 164
Fig. 9.2 Rear of Brisbane Water County Council building
(Source Nathan Scott, 20 October 2016) 164
Fig. 9.3 Rear of former Frogy’s roller skating rink (Source Nathan
Scott, 20 October 2016) 166
Fig. 9.4 Waltons Gosford advertisement circa 1966, Gostalgia
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/gostalgia/4602179465) 168
 List of Figures    xxi

Fig. 9.5 The rear of the new Walton’s store, later Frogys,

in October 1966 (Source Gostalgia: local history
from Gosford Library) 169
Fig. 9.6 Graffiti now largely obscure this bas relief sculpture in the
Brisbane Water County Council Building (Source http://
thenandtoday.com/australia/nsw/gosford-council/
gosford/bwcc-april-2017/) 171
Fig. 9.7 An everyday space transformed: plants colonise Frogy’s
interior (Source Michael Kilmister, June 2016) 174
Fig. 9.8 Interior shot of Frogy’s in 2016 showing the original
timber floors laid for Waltons, the roller skating rink
and the proliferation of street art (Source Michael
Kilmister, June 2016) 175