It’s a bit of a lengthy read but well worth it.

John Patrick Leary of Guernica Magazine explores what has recently become somewhat of a hot topic in regards to the increased amount of attention Detroit has seen the past few years.

More specifically, Leary focuses his argument on what has been dubbed “ruin porn” - otherwise known as the hundreds of thousands of pictures taken of Detroit’s dilapidated and crumbling ruins - and what greater purpose these photos are, or should be, serving.

It of course got me thinking about where I stood on the issue and whether or not I agreed that those pictures were exploiting the city’s demise rather than educating others about it….

Hey thats me! Michigan Central Station, Summer 2010. Photo by Nikki Farneti

Of course, as Leary well states, there is an unexplained fascination connected to these pictures, one that stirs deep internal emotions and urges that can’t necessarily be controlled - you just can’t help but look at these pictures and be taken by them. Hence the coined term ruin porn.

Leary makes the suggestion that the fascination may stem from the fact that unlike other major cities, Detroit’s history is so vividly visible within the ruins.

For someone from New York, Paris, or San Francisco, history seems more visible here, and this is the visual fascination that Detroit holds. As Marchand and Meffre write on their website, “Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.” In a country perennially plagued with a historical amnesia, ruins are rare permanent reminders of a history…

Leary then goes on to organize the jaded approaches to covering Detroit into three distinct categories: the metonym (i.e. “Detroit” is substitute for auto industry like “Wall Street” is substitute for high finance), the lament and finally the utopia, the latter of which I believe I fall squarely into.

It seems, to me at least, that Leary’s main frustration revolves around the notion that the ruin porn and the blase and lazy approach to writing about Detroit does little to actually tell the story and educate others about Detroit’s past.  Simply put, Leary argues the photographers care too much about the particular pictures themselves and not enough about why these scenes of destruction and decay are even there to begin with.

This is the style denounced locally as “ruin porn.” All the elements are here: the exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction; the unembarrassed rejoicing at the “excitement” of it all, hastily balanced by the liberal posturing of sympathy for a “man-made Katrina;” and most importantly, the absence of people other than those he calls, cruelly, “street zombies.” The city is a shell, and so are the people who occasionally stumble into the photographer’s viewfinder.

I’m going to agree and then disagree as well with Leary’s assessment.  While yes, photograph after photograph of the city’s blight without much of an explanation or further research is not only exploitative but also irresponsible and negligent I can’t help but think about what has resulted from those very photographs.

The “ruin porn” is what got people talking again, it opened up the eyes of so many and it got us to where we find ourselves today.  The ruins in those photographs lit a fire under our asses and made us angry. They made us question how we got here and examine what needed to be done to move the city forward.

At the end of the day, I fall into that third sub-genre of Detroit narrative as defined by Leary to be the Utopia, and I’m okay with that.  

Utopians are well-meaning defenders of the city’s possibilities. Locally, they are often politically active, often young, and, it should be noted, often white. This class of Detroit story chronicles Detroit’s possibilities, with a heavy emphasis on art and urban agriculture on abandoned land. It can also take the form of human-interest stories about local entrepreneurs persevering amidst the destruction.

In all I think that Leary’s assessment is an overall sound, honest and thorough look at where we find ourselves today in tryin to tell the story of Detroit and I think he sums it up best as to why the single photograph cannot quite do the city justice

Photgraphs…succeed, at least, in compelling us to ask the questions necessary to put this story together—Detroit’s story…That they themselves fail to do so testifies not only to the limitations of any still image, but our collective failure to imagine what Detroit’s future—our collective urban future—holds for us all.