[URBAN NOTE] "Beauty and the East": On ruin porn and post-Communist Europe

[rfmcdonald]

Transitions Online recently linked to Jamie Rann's essay at the Calvert Journal about the questionable politics surrounding ruin porn in post-Communist Europe. There are notable differences.

In an international context, however, the objectifying gaze of the ruin photographer can be revealing. Although the rhetorics of Cold Wars past and present would emphasise their difference, the gaze of the photographer helps to demonstrate the inherent kinship between the ruins of the US and those of the former USSR. In both countries, at around the same time, giant factory cities emerged, with the same purpose and with similar architectures and philosophies (Taylorism, Fordism, technological positivism); in both countries, industrial progress went hand-in-hand with extravagant defence spending, scattering expendable outposts of a vast military-industrial complex around a continent. In the ruin, subtleties of dogma are forgotten: when we look at the snapped pillars of a Greek temple, we don’t care whether it was dedicated to Apollo or Dionysus.

In the Russian context, this sense of serendipity is redoubled because the established western stereotype of communist Russia for so long excluded this personal aspect. In fact, ruin photography can be seen as a factor in a general shift in the perception of Russia and the Soviet Union: the superpower has not lost its reputation for strictness and inhuman grandeur, but now this — for better and for worse — is combined with a sense that the Soviet world is, from an aesthetic point of view, ready to be mined for content by the contemporary culture industry.

Soviet communism always had, in contemporary branding speak, “a great corporate aesthetic”: strong use of colour, an accessible visual grammar and eye-catching, easily reproducible logos. This branding recurs again and again in books like Soviet Ghosts (it is, to be fair, hard to avoid). This can be seen as part of a broader reassessment of the iconography of communism, one begun long ago. Once the symbols of the Soviet Union have been shifted into the world of ruins they becomes reusable as purely aesthetic objects. This is not unprecedented: the Renaissance world could “discover” and exploit the art and design of pagan antiquity precisely because its connection with ruination neutered the potential danger posed by its non-Christian origins. Once Venus de Milo has stumps for arms, she can be a symbol of secular beauty rather than, as she once was, a revered devotional figure. Likewise, a faded red star on a rusting missile is no longer a threat, but a mood board waiting to happen.

As many have observed, the nostalgic aspect of ruin photography is connected to a certain post-modern alienation: the ruins of the 20th century seem to conjure a lost, longed-for time of ideological self-confidence and practical purpose. The physicality evoked by these photos contrasts with the way they are consumed in the virtual world of the internet. Moreover, one of the reasons, I suggest, that ghost-city, ruin-porn photography is so popular is that its engagement with the physical offers the promise of serendipity. Photographers often juxtapose images of hulking buildings with quiet human moments — a girl’s doll, a faded poster, a family photo. The implicit message of the genre is “look what you can discover if you go through the locked door”. This makes it perfect for an information marketplace dominated by the peepshow principles of clickbait headlines: ruins offer a valuable online commodity — the possibility of a chance encounter with a sense of our own humanity.