Ruin Porn in Detroit: The Appeal and Consequence of Abandonment Photography

Ruin Porn in Detroit: The Appeal and Consequence of Abandonment Photography Marchand and Meffre, from “The Ruins of Detroit,” 2010.  "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. —Percy Bysshe Shelley Images of abandon have attracted artists throughout the ages, but the past decade has seen a tremendous rise in the contemporary American photographic penchant to seek out and photograph decay. Although images of urban ruin flow with great gust and attention from areas of concentrated abandonment along the Rust Belt—giving rise to a formal photographic genre of imaging urban ruins as signs of abandonment, disinvestment, and death called ‘ruin porn’— images of a ‘dead’ Detroit—categorized more specifically as Detroitism—are particularly socio- politically problematic. As the former ‘Foundry of the Nation,’ Detroit embodies cultural concepts of past American industrial prosperity. Exposed only to images of destroyed and abandoned inner city wonders of the Gilded Age, viewers draw misguided conclusions about contemporary urban Detroit through the “transparent account of reality” that abandonment photography constructs.i Spectators consume this allegorical desertion and perpetuate the narrative that Detroit is indeed a ruined wasteland, abandoned by all hope, occupied only by those holding on to the threads of past glory. This allegory is selective, misguided, and derisive. In looking beyond the lens that aims at and frames post-industrial decline alone, a wider image appears. This photographic ‘fetish for decay’ fashions a pervasive ideology that is acutely destructive to productive social legislation; the allegory of hopelessness engenders disinvestment and neglect. Consequences include widespread withdrawal of legislative attention and essential local resources—evidenced most recently by the near State-takeover of Detroit’s municipal financial autonomy. This fabricated ideology of abandon reinforces marginalization and   Russo 2   racialized poverty of the traditionally disenfranchised residents of Detroit who are increasingly rendered invisible, regardless of undying devotion to the vivacity of their city. To the many working artists who have made Detroit ruins the subject of their portfolios, the abandoned sites of the city possess an inherent ruin value, or ruinenwert, that has made Detroit a popular victim of the picturesque gaze and other ‘unconscious optics’ of ruin porn. Large-scale industrial prosperity during the Gilded Age spurred an economic surge for massive building projects, further industrial development, and, eventually, the “Fordizing of a Pleasant Peninsula.”ii Later named the Motor City, Detroit housed Henry Ford’s first large-scale assembly line in 1913, and soon became a wellspring of ‘Big Three,’ or ‘Detroit Three,’ automobile production.iii The car industry and culture, both centered in inner city Detroit, eventually contributed to the city’s own decline by providing the respective affluence and mobility for working class Detroiters to relocate to newly established suburbanites in the 1950s. Highways— necessary to access the suburban homes of Detroit’s working class—disrupted the metropolitan and industrial structure, and factories relocated from the inner city. New roadways also gentrified neighborhoods. Resultant segregation led to fierce social tensions and the Detroit riots of 1967, accelerating mass departure and deindustrialization.iv Public buildings erected for the working class of Detroit during the Gilded Age of production—like the Michigan Central Station and United Artists Theatre, which currently house a community garden and a parking garage respectively—are the ‘picturesque’ ruins throughout the inner city area used to shape its allegory of abandon. Due to its exceptional vulnerability to photographic predilections and perversions, Detroit is indeed problematic to visually document. With municipal high school graduation rates at less than one quarter, one third of residents living at or below the poverty level, and soaring   Russo 3   unemployment and homelessness rates, the need to report on the urban sociopolitical conditions of Detroit is undeniable.v Yet, as a critical viewer, one must question where the distinction lies between the exploitation of problematic ruin porn and the execution of professional artistic goals. The inherent difference is found in the fact that picturesque images of urban ruins are “analytically evasive” while still “aesthetically satisfying”; they suggest a journalistic function while presenting an inaccurate representation of Detroit, and photographers claim to ‘document’ its decline.vi Since it is the photographer’s gaze, “represented by the camera’s eye,” by which “the technology and conventions of photography force the reader to follow that eye and see the world from its position,” the city of Detroit is represented solely by the subjects of widely distributed abandonment photography but never by its social actuality.vii Through the selective and fetishistic photographic gaze, the source of Detroit’s decay, neglect, is decontextualized and misrepresented; it is “obscured under aesthetic concerns.”viii Erika Meitner writes: “outsiders are exploiting the city, and selling the rest of the country an inaccurate portrait of day-to-day.”ix Professional photographers, urban explorers, residents, travelers, and local and national media alike participate in the narrative of Detroit’s demise. Within the genre of the postindustrial picturesque, as in erotic pornography, there are varying levels of photographic ‘quality’, and various professional photographers, alongside innumerable tourists, have been prolific in crafting this narrative through ostensible ‘documentation of Detroit’s decline’. Great attention has recently been paid to photographic monographs by Andrew Moore (Detroit Disassembled) and by the working team Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (The Ruins of Detroit). Marchand and Meffre glorify Detroit’s decay within their artist statement, taken from their website: “Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the   Russo 4   Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.” Their statement continues, “Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.” As in the team’s photograph at the abandoned Packard Motors Plant (Figure 1), Detroit is framed through a cracked window, faded and fogged by years of disregard. The collection captures and portrays the city, with the sense of reality that photography engenders, with the window as another lens of hopeless desolation. The Ruins of Detroit includes photographs of destroyed public infrastructure like banks, police stations, and train stations (Figure 2). In Highland Park Police Station, aged records and booking photos litter the room filled with overturned desks and cabinets—presented as a symbol of the retreat of public protection. Marchand and Meffre capture the colossal ruins of a symbol of obsolete industry in Michagan Central Station. Photographs of educational institutions in complete ruination, like the George W. Ferris School (Figure 3) or St. Christopher House Public Library, leave no hope for future generations of Detroit. A clock, presumbly melted from architectural arson, communicates the stoppage of time—leaving no hope for regeneration. These photos create a narrative that “God has left Detroit” (Figure 4); indeed Marchand and Meffre reinforce the message of printed lettering in Detroit’s abandoned East Methodist Church that reads, “and they shall say God bid it” (Figure 5). Detroitism constructs imagery not of the reality of disinvestment, but of desertion; it frames an uninhabited and indeed uninhabitable landscape—a discontinuous history fractured from contemporary social reality. This unpopulated landscape, imbued with romantic nostalgia and concepts of history passed and time lost, is the perfect voyeur’s paradise. Contrary to journalistic documentation, Detroitism ignores the source of the decay; it crops the neglect and fails to prompt discourse on the underlying causes of industrial and political disinvestment, free   Russo 5   of any confrontational gaze of educated inhabitants. Ruin porn turns its back on human features that locate these landscapes within a vibrant present—one that is not abandoned or beyond hope, but indeed growing. As Susan Sontag explains, photographs, as “inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculations, and fantasy,” “cannot themselves explain anything… Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.”x If the camera records only abandon in Detroit, Detroit is understood as abandoned. Detroitism neither reveals the widespread political corruption, racial intolerance, nor the failing industrial model and entrenched financial and infrastructural problems that have led to the contemporary reality of urban Detroit. It rather constructs a narrative of Detroit’s inevitable demise. This narrative has severe consequences. The illustration of Detroit as a once-great crumbled giant—as portrayed by numerous monograph collections, coffee table books, high- profile media presentations, and travel blogs—renders Detroit unlivable by enacting the narrow belief that photographed ruins are little more than spatial expressions of past events and outmoded economic or sociopolitical phenomena. As Erika Meitner writes in a piece for the Virginia Quarterly entitled “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit”: Photos of any kind stop time. We, as viewers, assume that the picture we see documents an as-is mostly unchangeable reality. Frozen images of the ruins of Detroit lead us to the inevitable idea that in the Motor City, there’s no progress—only entropy, dissolution, and regress—that things will only get worse.xi Ruin porn fails to consider and stimulate reflection of coexistence with an ever-progressing civilization among the run-down wonders of Gilded Age prosperity, and thus images Detroit as lifeless as a post-apocalyptic science fiction setting. The desire to depict abandoned wonders— or, the ‘fetish for decay’—functions in an American cultural context by solidifying a perceived inevitability regarding the failure and death of the city of Detroit, and consequentially impacts   Russo 6   regional population in relation to socioeconomic status through withdrawal of ostensibly unnecessary resources for an apparently absent community. In order to explore the impulse and impetus behind abandonment photography, as well as the consequences of its proliferation, it is essential to discuss the classifications of the genre. Ruin porn is conceived in a Hegelian sense from an extensive lineage of ruin imagery, which has conventionally functioned to stimulate reflections on historical process—located both within past and future—that civilizations experience throughout time. The genre traditionally portrays memories and perceived failures of once-dominant cultures within certain temporalities and spaces by means of a perceived human desertion that stimulates unsettling reflections of an instable and indistinct future. It thus fails to make the connection between the subject’s cause and the imaged result. Originating far back in the roots of art history, ruin imagery garnered inclined significance in the visuality of Baroque tragic drama and reminiscence of the Golden Age of construction through idyllic Arcadian ruins (Figure 6).xii Ruin imagery climaxed in the context of Romanticism—reaching the complex incongruity of presence and absence, and accordingly inheriting a place within the conceptualization of the sublime. At this Romantic height, imagery of abandonment and ruin reached its full problematic potential by failing to signify underlying structures of subjects—fracturing history and memory. Indeed, it made this discrepancy picturesque in a manner that John Brinckerhoff Jackson analyzes as a “theatrical make- believe…purged of historical guilt.”xiii Jackson states that at this point, physical history of place “ceases to exist.”xiv Albert Speer, chief architect of Adolf Hitler and ultimately repentant Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, theorized extensively on the value of material ruin—‘ruinenwert’ in the German. Looking back to classical design and idealistic   Russo 7   Romantic revelry of Greek and Roman ruins as symbols of once-great empires, Speer designed towards the potential propagandistic affects of the structures he drafted in future ruin.xv Speer endorsed perpetuation of mythological history over truth through the building of a “bridge of tradition,” or planned propagandistic longevity through the picturesque remnants of Hitler’s building projects.xvi In his memoirs, Speer reflects on his Theory of Ruin Value, or Die Ruinenwerttheorie: By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models. To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there.xvii German philosopher Walter Benjamin also makes the connection between ruin imagery and its parallel cultural allegory in his work entitled The Origin of German Tragic Drama.xviii Benjamin defines the allegory of destruction as a temporal or visualized reflection of the historicity of humanity’s metaphysics, writing: “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”xix His thinking strengthens perceived symmetry between ruin and allegory, presenting history as a discontinuous collection of fragments. Benjamin’s premise: “in the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting,” reveals the caustic ideology of ruin imagery that allows for the disembodiment of image and subject devoid of significant cultural, social, and historical context.xx Thus, the genre of ruin imagery has functioned to reveal cultural perceptions and to stimulate reactions towards urbanity, instability, and decline—to create a sense of cultural flux reflecting power, citizenship, and perceptions of ethnicity and imposed racial dominance. Yet, throughout the centuries, ruin imagery has gained a pictorial Romantic impression of elegance, even majesty. Ruin imagery has been located within the sublime and now embodies a   Russo 8   picturesque aesthetic far removed from realistic causality, and the parallel photographic genre has adopted this aestheticized response to destruction with greater poignancy than other media previously permitted. This photographic predilection for communicating the ephemeral, uncertainty, and destruction is due to “the camera’s special aptitude,” as Susan Sontag describes, for the “injuries of time.”xxi The photographic mode itself, by nature capturing otherwise inaccessible moments of the fleeting past, is prone to misrepresent its subjects through a distorted lens of nostalgia and framed reality. In a response to a collection of four photographic monographs that the author collectively labels reflections on “modernist ruins,” Elizabeth Blackmar writes: “the retrospective quality of the photographic medium... invites a doubling of the sensation of time lost and places abandoned through the images of ruins.”xxii Through selective framing, the photographer’s gaze constructs fragments of a discontinuous reality.xxiii The curator of a current exhibit through The New York Public Library’s Exhibitions Program entitled “Photography and Decay” explains these photographic phenomena further on the exhibition website: Photographs, often characterized as frozen moments in time, are in truth physical objects in perpetual transition, born of a medium that is itself thought to be disappearing. Created by light falling on photosensitive surfaces, photographs begin as passing instants that continue to evolve as they materialize as images. Even when fixed or printed, photographs remain susceptible to change due to internal flaws, artistic intervention, or environmental factors. As objects in flux from the moment of inception, photographs are like ruins, or fragments of time. Traces and remnants of the past, they are simultaneously stable and transient, present and absent. If it is so that this particular and problematic preoccupation of the photographic genre with ruin imagery must be concluded from inherent characteristics of the medium itself, the question arises: Why do these images of ruin continue to enchant and captivate contemporary viewers? In tracing the roots of what she calls the “sheer pictorial allure of vulnerable buildings   Russo 9   set against an aggressive or indifferent present,” Blackmar discusses the process of early American photographers, like Thomas Easterly with his daguerreotypes of St. Louis during the mid nineteenth century (Figure 6), in forming a storyline of American ruins.xxiv Blackmar shows early photographers’ adoption of this penchant for decay in the ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ through the positioning of ruins as prominent to the narrative of American landscapes and therefore to the nation’s history.xxv This amalgamated significance emerges from human psychological impulses of curiosity, nostalgia, and romance, which coalesce into voyeurism. In the view of Tim Edensor, professor of geography at Manchester Metropolitan University, visually experiencing ruins provides an escape from excessive order through aged architecture, and obscure objects located at a psychological distance from daily uniformity.xxvi He writes: “…they are able to stimulate sensual apprehension beyond the cognitive, and evoke memories and other thoughts that escape the pragmatism of an ordered social world.”xxvii Edensor argues that spatial characteristics of urban ruins stand in stark contrast to the confines of the aesthetically and socially “regulated spaces” of our daily lives, and provide the spectator with cathartic experiences of surprise and intrigue.xxviii This pleasurable nostalgia through the beautification and romanticization of ruins creates an “imagined reconciliation of the land and history that erases conflict, including conflicts over future issues.”xxix Conversely, the fascination and “pleasure of ruins” is constructed through humanity’s complicated relationship with the physical substantiation of its own failures.xxx Imaging majestic ruins is cathartic—it allows the viewer to operate personally through the narrative of declining or lost power. The viewer positions the act of viewing within aestheticized ruins—engaging both romantic and masochistic narratives.  The mighty Gilded Age architectural ruins of Detroit— fitted within allegory—provide ideal architectural memento mori. An example of this   Russo 10   participatory narrative is found in a music video form the rap artist Eminem for his song entitled “Beautiful” (2009), which includes footage of the demolition of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium as a metaphor for the rapper’s depression and artistic decline. In “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit, Meitner writes: These abandoned spaces become active sites of meaning-making and narrative and reuse both for people inside the city and outsiders who report on disintegration and abandonment, the spectacle of large-scale decay and transformation, the violence perpetrated on these structures by humans and nature and time. We, as viewers, lament over them, are awed by them, can’t look away.xxxi In the words of Benjamin, this fetishization is evidence that humanity’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”xxxii The “struggle against misery” has been stripped of political meaning and transformed into a consumer good, into “objects of distraction and amusement” and of, “contemplative pleasure.”xxxiii The likeness of abandonment photography to erotic pornography is further revealed within a feminist analysis of these phenomena. The uninhibited reproducibility of the photographic medium creates wider possibility for public participation in the narrative of Detroitism, and the framed voyeurism reaches compulsive and perverse levels. Theorists liken this fetishism to pornography inasmuch as abandonment photography replaces engagement in the social narratives of built environments with constructed fantasy. Thus, ‘ruin porn’. “Photographs objectify; they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.”xxxiv The captivation is a fetishization. Dynamics of power are disrupted and imbalanced between captor and subject. The camera’s “desiring gaze” is fixed on abandoned, though framed, settings— ostensibly representative fantasy subjects.xxxv Recalling the distance of the pornographer and the performing star, as well as the anonymity of pornography’s distribution and viewership, the   Russo 11   fetishization and exposure of Detroitism is mainly perpetuated by what Detroiters refer to as ‘outsiders’ of the region—visitors who pass through, collecting souvenirs of the ruin narrative that they in turn reinforce through widespread distribution through mechanical media outlets. Citing the recent release of three major photographic monographs of Detroitism—Detroit Disassembled, Lost Detroit, and The Ruins of Detroit—Meitner writes: “One could argue right now that in addition to cars, Detroit’s biggest export is representations of the city itself.”xxxvi Racial issues arise from the voyeurism performed by outsiders of Detroit—typically young, white, middle class tourists—who invade vacant sites to capture visual and tangible tokens of a selectively framed narrative with a colonizing gaze, avoiding the social issues that both supply and emerge from the magnificently picturesque subjects of their photographic oeuvres. One great power of the photographic medium and the framed image is its ability to create narratives that build and reinforce ideologies. It can construct complicated and problematic realities into alluring, aestheticized subjects and present selective framing as reality. Although oriented in pleasure-seeking nostalgic or voyeuristic attraction, these ideologies have severe impacts to the reality of what they deny through selective framing. Though photographs of Gilded Age ruins may be beautiful, they neither represent Detroit nor its communities. Indeed, the city has been stereotyped and exploited by media generators, and subsequently misunderstood by media consumers. Images of industrial ruin fail to inspire confidence for renewal by condemning the city to a narrative of total abandon and creating the ostensible impossibility of revival, while unnoted inhabitants are rendered and perceived as invisible by industry, policy, and humanity. From the tragic ruins of the industrial age that scatter the landscape from Michigan to Mississippi, perhaps we who live among such monumental examples of overreaching industry   Russo 12   may learn from example to build with appropriate scale, to localize communities into sustainable centers of growth and development proportional to population. Photographers, as humans with voyeuristic appetites for the cathartic and masochistic pleasure of ruins, should be called to consider the social consequences of limiting the picturing a region with only its most majestic failures. Artists and community members alike should publicize growth and success rather than hopeless despair—should shift focus from the “quotidian making of civilian ruins” to an active, present tense.xxxvii Spectators, by channeling nostalgia into a broader understanding of social reality, should actively engage in and contribute to the “visibility of postindustrial landscapes and, by extension, the visual history of deindustrialization.”xxxviii This hope should not be manifest in problematic cultural imperialism by sanctimonious outsiders—furthering current sociopolitical gentrification—but rather in a return to true democratic process and fair presentation of the rising city of Detroit.   Russo 13    Works Cited Books: Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn, 217-251. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Brinckerhoff Jackson, John. The Necessity for Ruins. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Cline, Leonard Lanson. “Michigan: The Fordizing of a Pleasant Peninsula.” In These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s, edited by Daniel H. Borus, 181-187. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Edensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005. Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes,” in The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells, 354-374. London: Routledge, 2003. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Translated by Verlag Ullstein GmbH. London: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Sugrue, Thomas J.. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.   Russo 14   Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature. Westminster: Knopf Publishing Group, 2003. Articles: Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” New Left Review 62 (July-August 1970): 1-9. Fassi, Anthony J.. “Industrial Ruins, Urban Exploring, and the Postindustrial Picturesque.” The New Centennial Review 10/1 (Spring 2010): 141-152. Meitner, Erika. “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit.” Virginia Quarterly Review 87/2 (Spring 2011): 124-127. Zucker, Paul. “Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20/2 (Winter 1961): 119-130.   Russo 15   Notes:                                                                                                                 i Susan Sontag. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 81. ii Leonard Lanson Cline, “Michigan: The Fordizing of a Pleasant Peninsula,” in These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s, ed. Daniel H. Borus. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992),180. iii Cline, “Michigan,” 185. iv Thomas J. Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 24. v Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 16. vi Elizabeth Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” American Quarterly 53/2 (June 2001): 331. vii Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells. (London: Routledge, 2003), 355. viii Anthony J Fassi, “Industrial Ruins, Urban Exploring, and the Postindustrial Picturesque,” The New Centennial Review 10/1 (Spring 2010): 149. ix Erika Meitner, “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit,” Virginia Quarterly Review 87/2 (Spring 2011): 127. x Susan Sontag. On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 23. xi Meitner, “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit,” 129. xii Christopher Woodward. In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature (Westminster: Knopf Publishing Group, 2003). xiii John Brinckerhoff Jackson. The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 92. xiv Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins, 92. xv Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Verlag Ullstein GmbH (London: Simon & Schuster, 1970). xvi Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 56. xvii ibid, 56. xviii Walter Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998). xix Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. xx ibid, 178. xxi Sontag. On Photography, 67. xxii Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” 324. xxiii Sontag, On Photography, 22. xxiv Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” 324. xxv Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 00. xxvi Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005). xxvii Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 98. xxviii ibid, 53. xxix Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” 330. xxx Paul Zucker. “Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20/2 (Winter 1961): 119. xxxi Meitner, “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit,” 127. xxxii Benjamin, “Art,” 242. xxxiii Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” New Left Review 62 (July-August 1970): 91-92. xxxiv Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 81. xxxv Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” 329. xxxvi Meitner, “This is Not a Requiem for Detroit,” 127. xxxvii Blackmar. “Modernist Ruins,” 331. xxxviii Fassi, “Industrial Ruins,” 148-9.     Russo 16