Detroit: Disaster Magnetism
by Todd ~ August 26th, 2009. Filed under: Documentary, Photojournalism.Conscientious has highlighted an article on Vice about the flood of journalists and photographers making the pilgramage to Dtroit to document the implosion of the city. The decline has been going on for a long time, but its the hot topic for media looking for a quick traffic spike. Tomorrow Museum calls it “ruin porn“. As I’ve talked about before, Detroit is just one more “end of civilization” location shoot, starting with Chernobyl and running through Katrina-era New Orleans.
I’m sure there are other, more shiny things to shoot in Detroit. But at this point, no one would believe it, even in a photograph.
August 26th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
The new HBO series “Hung” is shot in Detroit and is more than ruin porn, showing a different side of the city, although the openign credits have a bit of this.
August 28th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Still “Hung” is about a guy so far gone that he’s turned to being a gigolo to make a living. Isn’t that just a “ruin porn” of another type?
August 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Ha, I suppose so but as far as I can tell his situation has little or nothing to do with Detroit’s economic decline.
August 29th, 2009 at 10:29 am
There’s a point of view that the backstory to the creation process isn’t part of the work itself and is irrelevant. The meaning of an artwork must arise from the piece alone.
Personally, I think things are more complicated than that. Each work of art (though I haltingly apply that to “Hung”) has its own cloud of context hanging around its head and the backstory to why a setting was selected certainly sits in that cloud. Still, I’d say the context of what Detroit has come to mean in this time is hugely powerful, even overpowering, when considering works set in that city, even those set in times prior to Detroit’s slide to decrepitude. Now that we know what’s happened, there will be a sense of foreboding to any story set there historically.