A Brief History of Ruin Porn

This is an edited version of a piece I wrote for Article Magazine, for their summer/spring 2012 Broken Issue. I highly recommend you buy the magazine itself to read some great pieces on art, culture and urbanism. It's really great. Buy it.

Several summers ago I was in China and ended up on the outskirts of a city after getting on the wrong bus. I was a few miles from the tourist destination I was trying to get to and no buses were coming for hours, so I ended up walking down a long dusty street in between acres of dusty, semi-demolished factories. Red Chinese characters clinging to shattered cement, vast expanses of the heaped gravel of broken bricks, rusty wires poking out from smashed pillars. It was beautiful and striking in a way that we fairly casually accept nowadays, and when I posted photos of the scene on facebook my friends commented that if this was in the UK it’d be a prime location for bands to pose for moody photos amongst the debris. We’re pretty happy to accept without question that broken buildings can be beautiful, and are maybe inherently beautiful just by virtue of their broken-ness. In day to day life we despise and disregard broken objects and machines, but we take weekend trips to the remains of broken medieval buildings, pore over photos of urban decay in deprived cities, and remark on the beauty of art spaces created in the ruins of industrial buildings. We have all become more or less amenable to the charms of Ruin Porn. We can all appreciate the work of the Ruin Pornographers who document the gradual collapse of our built environment, through the novels of Ballard, through the fad for monochrome photos of abandoned warehouses (with or without bands slouching moodily in the foreground), through music which calls on imagery of collapsing cities and desolate streets. Ruined buildings represent a neat collision of beauty and tragedy that can be used over and over again, transformed and transplanted into different contexts: the decaying castles of a Constable painting are just as much in the spirit of Ruin Porn as the decaying housing estates of a grime video. The first hints of Ruin Pornographers at work appeared in Renaissance painting - fractured classical statues and sun-drenched Roman temples act as a visual reminder of the ghost of classical civilisation that was gradually re-emerging in European Culture. It wasn’t until the 18th Century though that Ruin Porn as an aesthetic in itself really took off. As industrialisation began to put an end to the landscape of Medieval England, Romantic poets and artists found something beautiful to champion in the broken remains of previous ages. The tattered battlements of decaying castles and the smashed arches of medieval monasteries were viewed as the ruins of a heroic, idealised, but ultimately doomed past. The pathos of the great and noble ancient civilisation brought to an end by the passage of time was evoked time and time again in art and literature, and for a time it seemed to be a particularly English obsession. For Wordsworth, the ruins of Tintern Abbey, as a meeting of the natural and human worlds, become a site of personal revelation and transcendence. Shelley’s Ozymandias captures the irony of an ancient Pharaoh’s arrogant epitaph (”Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”) read amongst the ruins of his palace - “that colossal wreck, boundless and bare”. Human civilisation seemed to be in some sense permanently on the verge of decay and collapse. For Wordsworth and Shelley the broken ruins of human endeavour perfectly capture the sublime, brief, melancholia of human life. At the same time the mass popularity of Ruin Porn manifested itself in a craze for building fake classical ruins in the grounds of country houses. In 1740 Lord Belvedere commissioned a gigantic ruined abbey to be constructed on his estate, supposedly in front of the house where his estranged wife had moved in with his brother. This popular “ruin lust” of the 18th Century is the subject of the most comprehensive histories history of Ruin Porn, Rose Macauley’s 1953 book The Pleasure of Ruins. Macauley herself was intimately familiar with the ruins of the 20th Century after her West London flat was destroyed in the Blitz. The experience of returning from a trip to find only ruins where her building had stood was one which profoundly shaped her approach to the simultaneous horror and beauty that lies at the heart of Ruin Porn. For her, one of the greatest examples of ruin aesthetics was the 1872 engraving by Gustave Doré: ‘The New Zealander’. At first glance, Doré’s subject appears to be a classical scene: a silhouetted figure in the foreground sitting on a lump of masonry, looking at a ruined city across the river: broken Greek columns, the stumps of collapsed buildings, a decapitated Roman dome. When we look again, we realise that the city which Doré’s New Zealander is watching over is in fact a future vision of London - the cracked dome of St Pauls, the faded lettering of Commercial Wharf, the broken arch of London Bridge. All the pathos, majesty and unease that a Ruin Pornographer could ask for.

The first half of the 20th Century saw a profound change in Ruin Porn. It shed the dewy-eyed gaze of the previous centuries. Ruin Pornographers no longer looked on broken buildings and saw the glories of bygone utopias, instead they saw the horrors of warfare and the anxieties of an age of sprawling, mechanised urbanism. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Beckett’s Endgame both adopt Ruin Porn in a Modernist guise that’s far removed from the wistful nostalgia of the Romantics and the Victorians. Such works constructed an unsentimental picture of a ruined future emerging from a collapsing present. Within decades these visions of a world in ruins came terrifying close to being realised. The complete annihilation of so many urban landscapes during the Second World War inspired a new generation of morbidly curious Ruin Pornographers to document their broken cities in film. In Paisà (1946) Rosselini’s camera tracks with loving fascination across seemingly endless acres of rubble in ruined Italian cities, and the fractured, half-missing architecture of the streets lingers silently and menacingly in the background of slow-paced shots. Much like Macauley, J.G. Ballard’s traumatic experience of the ransacking of his childhood home by Japanese soldiers gave rise to a strong sense of Ruin Porn in much of his later work. Ballard’s influence is particularly notable in the landscape art of Robert Smithson, wherein ruins are re-conceived as a natural expression of entropy and decay.
Really though, when we look at where Ruin Pornographers have gotten their fix since 1945, we find that they’ve been increasingly focusing on one particular aspect of popular culture: since the 1960s, Ruin Porn has been one of the most constant aesthetic fads of popular music. Today it’s beyond a cliche. Any band or artist wishing to conjure up an image of gritty realism, hard-times melancholia or an aura of violence and provocation will instantly head down to their nearest disused warehouse, deserted housing estate or graffiti-strewn back alley and lounge menacingly against exposed brickwork or broken concrete. It’s a staple of any video or photo-shoot, whether you’re the local indie band or the millionaire pop star. The metaphors and similes of Ruin Porn are handy signifiers of hard-bitten exposed-nerves emotional realism for the lyrically lazy. At its best this aesthetic informs lyrics like Bruce Springsteen’s heart-breaking dissections of small town America in decline, or Nick Cave’s gothic-heroin-punk prose. At its most prosaic it’s pretty much all that’s going on in Greenday’s ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, and has formed the basis of sixth-form Death Metal bands’ output.

In the Northern England in particular, bands seem to have always had a special affection for industrial dereliction, desolate stretches of smashed concrete and decaying Victorian brickwork cast in monochrome filters. Industrial spaces become broken as soon as production stops - its the lack of movement, the stasis of the industrial wasteland that tells us that something is wrong with the scene. While the ruins that the Romantic poets imagined were decaying organically and full of movement, industrial ruins are frozen at the moment of collapse. Bands pictured in the ruins of the factory are cast as feral animals who’ve wandered into the shot by accident, figures of movement against an unmoving landscape, suspicious of the photographer’s intrusion into it. Of course, this love affair with Ruin Porn really kicked off when the factories started to close in the late 70s. There had been flirtations before then, like the famous shot of the pre-Ringo Beatles lounging in a decaying train yard in Hamburg, but it was really only once British industry was dying that the aesthetic came into its own. As the boom years ended, industry retreated and the broken spaces it left behind on the outskirts of town were reclaimed. Post-punk is still the unmistakable music of 20th Century ruin. The music of Joy Division, Gang Of Four, The Fall et al. is intrinsically linked in popular imagination with images of the crumbling industrial estates of Northern cities, or the decaying Modernist housing of Hulme or Park Hill. When we look back on photos of these broken landscapes, we could be forgiven for thinking they were populated entirely by a new species of thin young men and women in lumpy charity shop overcoats carrying synthesisers and androgynous haircuts. Needles in the stairwells. Stained modernist concrete. Songs about broken utopias. The basic tropes of gritty, dystopian Ruin Porn are all present and correct. The association of post-punk with images of urban decay has been run into the ground by two decades of unimaginative photographers and film makers, but it would still be nice to be able to claim that it was these young men and women from Northern cities who were the sole pioneers of the art of late 20th Century Ruin Porn. The truth is that the movement of popular culture into the decaying spaces left behind by industry was taking place across the Western World. Berlin was (and is) home to arguably the archetypal urban squat scene, with spaces such as Kommune 1 and Café Krautscho providing an environment for radical politics and arts to flourish amongst the broken ruins of the city’s industry. In the eyes of the Ruin Pornographer, Berlin has special significance. This is partly because of its artistic history: Berlin in the 20s and 30s seemed to be a city on the edge of collapse, a decadent, broken mass of nightclubs and political strife, art deco splendour and economic decay, limping blindly towards war. After the war Berlin was reduced to a ruin in a literal sense, largely destroyed by warfare and broken in half between East and West. As late as the early 90s half-destroyed Nazi bunkers were being discovered in the newly reunified city centre. West Berlin’s arts scene from the late 60s onwards was obsessed with the imagery of Ruin Porn, the reminders of the city’s traumatic past half-buried amongst new buildings. The city’s New Wave bands took this to new heights, most notably every Ruin Pornographer’s favourite industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten (literally, ‘Collapsing New Buildings’), who played instruments custom-built out of twisted scrap metal and construction tools pulled from the abandoned factories of West Berlin. Simultaneously, Ruin Porn was on the rise in the US. Just like in Manchester and Berlin, the slow collapse of industry in New York provided new arts and performance spaces in industrial ruins. Warhol’s Factory was obviously in an abandoned manufacturing space, but with its silver paint, tin foil and proto-glam superstars Warhol deliberately distanced the space from the aesthetics of ruin and decay - whereas the No Wave scene of the late 70s embraced them. Perhaps the archetypal image of New York Ruin Porn is a scene from the 1978 short film Guérillère Talks: a 19 year-old Lydia Lunch, wearing sunglasses and a leather skirt hangs off a rusting fire escape ladder in a half-demolished factory and delivers a monologue to the camera in a childlike whine: “Just look at the recreational facilities we have, it makes you really angry to think that the only kind of toys you get to have is all the junk other people leave out. What else is there but violence and destruction and anger when you have nothing better to do but run around burnt playgrounds? I mean I wish I had a regular swing set like all the other kids but I gotta hang off a fire escape. It's no fun being a teenager anymore.”
Over the course of the next decade though the musical focus of Ruin Porn in the US shifted - by the late 80s the music of urban decay was no longer experimental post-punk but the Hip Hop, House and Detroit Techno that emerged from the black communities left in poverty by the disappearance of industry in the Northern America’s old manufacturing capitals. Detroit in particular has become another Shangri-La for Ruin Pornographers. The image of this city as the ultimate signifier of total urban decay has taken on a life of its own in popular imagination, quite separate from the reality of the place itself. The Detroit of the Ruin Porn fantasies is a post-apocalyptic, almost post-human landscape of decaying industry. Collapsing auto plants, remnants of the late 60s riots, faded American Gothic and graffiti-covered tenements. Detroit’s Hip hop and Techno scenes embraced the Ruin Porn aesthetic wholeheartedly. Hip hop’s ongoing obsession with ‘the streets’ and ‘the ghetto’ stems from this. Broken buildings: factories without production and tenements without inhabitants. These are the liminal spaces of the city where people go when they need somewhere to escape to, to hang out with their friends, get drunk or high, make music and hold parties. The Ruin Porn of Hip hop has a distinctly different atmosphere from the Ruin Porn of Berlin and Manchester Post-Punk. Einstürzende Neubauten and The Fall look backwards at the ruins they find themselves amongst, examining the heroic failure of the modernist city - but Detroit Techno and the Bronx’s post-industrial Hip hop have no time for utopianism. In America, the destruction of Modernism was so complete that by the 1980s there were no utopias left, not even those in ruins. The quintessential symbol of American urban modernism, Pruitt-Igoe, was demolished so completely in 1973 that to this day there is only grassy scrubland in the place where it once stood - not a broken utopia, but one completely scrubbed from the face of the earth. The Ruin Porn of Hip Hop revels in the destruction, the broken shapes of the cities it reverberates in and the disrepair of the liminal spaces it’s forced to occupy through social and economic exclusion.

The visual power of these images has undoubtedly been eroded through over-use. It’s hard to take in the Ruin Porn aesthetic of Lydia Lunch or Einsturzunde Neubauten without it conjuring up the image somewhere in your head of sixth-form goths crouching amongst the ruins of medieval abbey, or suburban rappers posing awkwardly against a semi-demolished housing estate. But if we can get our heads past the sentimental cliches of the most blatant abuses of Ruin Porn and think back to the social and economic context in which Post-Punk and Hip Hop acts first adopted it, it’s an aesthetic that still has immense relevance to the times we live in. Owen Hatherley’s recent book A Guide to The New Ruins of Great Britain looks at the ruinous effects of the Blairite boom and Cameronite bust on British City Centres, and a side effect of the recession is that once again the semi-decayed spaces left behind by companies gone bust are available for arts organisations at rock bottom rents. There are just as many liminal spaces and broken buildings ripe for exploitation in our cities as there were in the late 70s, but we have to look beyond the worst cliches of Ruin Porn to find them. Nonetheless, the Ruin Pornographers of the early 21st Century are still studying the slow collapse of our buildings creating arresting art around it. Yves Marchond and Romain Meffre’s photographs of the decaying splendour of Detroit are currently on exhibition in the London’s Wilmotte Gallery. Unlike much of the Ruin Porn of the last half-century, these photos are empty of people. The abandoned schools and churches they photograph look as though no humans have touched them for decades. It looks like no one in Detroit can even stir up the interest to vandalise these spaces, let alone repair them.
The eerily clinical and impartial atmosphere of Marchond and Meffre’s photographs are similar to an even more modern form of Ruin Porn. The phenomenon of urban exploration, whereby people gain entry to abandoned buildings (tunnels, hospitals and military bases are favourite places) and abandoned irradiated villages in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are also popular online. These ruins are all completely devoid of people, properly post-human and the suspicion that the people who once populated these buildings met with a violent end is inescapable. The Ruin Pornographers who pore over these photos are constructing a truly post-apocalyptic vision of the every day, a built environment with no humans to occupy it. Similarly, the huge popularity of zombies and other post-apocalyptic themes in recent cinema is largely based on the thrill of reimagining the mundane buildings and streets we occupy every day as stripped of humanity, recast as the arena of a desperate struggle for survival. The theorist Mark Fisher captures this eerie but fascinating sensation when he describes another classic of recent Ruin Porn cinema, Children of Men (2006): “The catastrophe in Children Of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.” We’re back again with Doré’s New Zealander at broken arch of London Bridge looking across at the ruins of Commercial Wharf, staring at the Ruin Porn of our own future cities.

Further Reading

Dillon, Brian, 'Ruin Lust: Our Love Affair with Decaying Buildings', The Guardian, 17 Feb 2012.

Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zer0 Books: 2009.

Hatherley, Owen, A Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso: 2010.

Macauley, Rose, Pleasure Of Ruins, Thames & Hudson: 1984.