Description
Seeing the surfaces of the city as reflections of the social landscape is a characteristic impulse in times of change. Especially in modern cities, urban decay and ruin have inspired the Western cultural imagination, referring to the underbelly of economic and social progress. Before the invention of visual technologies, other aesthetic traditions such as literature and painting were resources for perceiving and appreciating scenes of neglect and impoverishment, as well as signs of decay and aging (Kemp and Rheuban, 1990, p. 102). This task was later taken up by photography and film that turned their lenses towards the marginal and mundane not only as the picturesque decay that is inherent in romanticized and exoticized images of natural and urban landscapes, but also by employing the ruin as a symbolic element of the degradation of identity markers, values, economy, and the social fabric.This paper explores how the critical potential of images of ruin is formed in the historical context of destruction by war and deindustrialization. It focuses on three photographic moments: post-2008 Athens in the project Spleen (2009-2017) by Georges Salameh; the war-torn Beirut in the 1980s in Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs; and the old, disappearing Paris in the nineteenth century in Eugène Atget’s (1857-1927) photography series. By discussing images of ruins from different times, the dialogue between old and new, and the past and present, the aim is to highlight how the perception of the urban landscape is not only a matter of memory but also of critical observation of society in a larger temporal frame.
By paying particular attention to Athens as a contemporary post-crisis city, this paper argues that images of urban decay hold special potential for imagining the interconnections between different phenomena related to neoliberal processes, as well as suggesting causalities. The photographs by Atget, Ristelhueber, and Salameh provide their particular lens to observe how melancholic representations of recent ruins connote human activity and agency in economic and environmental decline. This paper frames these photographs from distinct contexts as part of a larger network of images of destruction, disaster, and war, that feeds a specific aftermath aesthetic by portraying the silent aftermath of events rather than action. Their vulnerability arises from the “radically open, radically laconic” character of aftermath photography that may appear weakly engaged (Campany, 2003, n.p.). Therefore, this paper proposes that the cultural significance of the aftermath aesthetic of “recent ruins” arises from the complexity that prevails in their capacity to refer to larger phenomena phenomena, while lending themselves to decontextualization, reflecting the instability of the ruin.
| Period | 11 Jul 2024 → 12 Jul 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | 3º Congresso RNEC – Rede Nacional de Estudos Culturais: Cultural Studies – Inter-Multi-Trans-Pan-Anti-In-Disciplinary Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 3 |
| Location | Porto, PortugalShow on map |