Can we come from Ruin Porn to Ruin Nudes?
19.07.2016
Supervisor: Dr. Angelika Möller
In my series of photographs I try to approach the topic of ruin porn from a personal angle. The term itself is a critique of a photographic genre common in "abandoned America". Artists like Marchand and Meffre are reproached for exploiting challenged cities by exposing it to the viewers pornographic gaze. However, looking at their images it is hard to doubt the aesthetic qualities inherent to the places they shoot. They, or their images, get their awe from supposedly lingering around the dangerous border of death and live, violating the distinction of nature and culture, like in the famous motif of the tree growing out of a window. Most of them are industrial ruins, their implied "death" a visual question what to do with the remnants of industrialism in the postindustrial "West".
I lived among people who complained about victimization by ruin porn, people I liked and feared
and sometimes loved and whose complains I do not want to take easy. But like the human body,
those places have a beauty and awe inspiring charisma to it. As a photographer, my first profession,
I had to find ways how to take images of those places without rendering them passive, abandoned
and vulnerable.
I do not claim to have found them, and I certainly do not claim moral superiority over other photographers. I tried my best to trace how people live in and with two industrial plants that, while still alive, producing, and place-building, do not produce in their primordial function anymore.
