Henri Cartier-BressonToday is the birthday of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004).
The Ruins of Detroit
Yesterday the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy. Seems like a pretty momentous step, but I don't think anyone is surprised. The decline of Detroit has been long and steady and, despite recent glimmers of hope and redevelopment, has seemed inevitable even to a casual observer hundreds of miles away.
I've never really been to Detroit. Years ago, a company I worked for did some business there, but I never visited that client. I've spent a couple of hours making connections through the airport there, but that doesn't count. When I think about Detroit I'm probably more likely to think of Motown than of General Motors. But the news from Detroit reminded me of a portfolio of photographs that has given me my mental image of Detroit at the end of the 20th century.
The Ruins of Detroit is a collaboration of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre that documents the urban decay of Detroit. The photographs are beautiful, haunting images of streets and buildings and, to me the most interesting, the inside of buildings. I could study them for hours, both for the beauty and detail captured in the photographs, and for the haunting feeling of loss and abandonment. It was a feeling I'd first had thirty years ago in a very different place.
Before it was the North Carolina Transportation Museum the rail yard in Spencer, NC was the abandoned shell of Southern Railway Company's largest steam locomotive servicing facility. During the time it was abandoned I made several visits, always carrying a camera as a talisman against the physical dangers of an abandoned industrial site and the crime of trespassing.
 
Going through the massive back shop, the round house and the offices, it looked as if the crew had knocked off work one evening and had never come back. I remember the wood-block floor in the round house, starting to come apart at the edges. The upholstered seats and fabric curtains, fragile but intact, inside a Pullman car. A wooden desk in the office, swivel chair pushed back and paperclips still in the drawer.
When British photographer Michael Day visited Pripyat, the city in the Ukraine built to support the Chernobyl nuclear power station, he said "It was like a living museum." His photographs, too, reminded me of that rail yard thirty years ago, but to me all of these images - Detroit, the Southern Railway yard and Pripyat - capture the opposite of "living museum."
They are not museums, but real, everyday places. Places that were created for a purpose, not to be abandoned, stuck in time and left as voyeuristic windows into what was. And they are not living, but dead, poorly embalmed corpses.
It is this erosion of what was into what is, and the melancholy emotion captured in the best of these images, that make them so compelling.
IntroductionHe did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. A tourist accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. Paul Bowles Unfortunately for the world (or at least for stories about the world) there are not many travelers like this left. The ultra-rich who traveled to escape boredom; the embarrassing son shipped off on remittance; the expatriate artist disgusted with home and seeking inspiration in foreign lands. All of these have faded from our landscape. Their stories have, too. The homogenization of commerce and the ubiquitousness of American culture have made one place more or less like any other, catering to the tourist and leaving the traveler unable to elude ”his own civilization.” Or even distinguish it from any other.
Perhaps a more modern and more useful distinction between tourist and traveler is one of attitude and intent. The tourists is passive; the traveler active. The tourist wants to be led; the traveler wants to get lost. The tourist seeks to observe; the traveler to participate. The traveler eschews homogenization and searches for unique experiences at the cost of comfort and conformity. The tourist wants a Coke at McDonald's. It’s this tourist who has overwhelmed the art of travel photography. The current generation may have avoided the stereotypical post-vacation slide show, only to replace it with the speed of digital imaging, the self-absorption of the selfie, and the banality of the blogosphere. Whatever the source, the result is too often the same: bland, boring, technically challenged pictures that say nothing about the place they were taken and less about the person who took them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Photography is at once analogue and antidote to the tourist/traveler dichotomy. Good photography (and, to some degree, even the attempt at good photography) is both a path to and a result of being a true traveler.The authentic traveler is more tuned into their environment and more acutely aware of their surroundings. Especially more visually aware. This heightened sense is not blinded by repetition and dulled by boredom, but transforms seeing new things into seeing in new ways. And nothing could be more exciting for a photographer. The travel photographer is engaged in a scene in a way a more casual observer is not. She is more connected with the environment, the weather, the people. He is constantly looking at not just what is inside the frame, but what is around the corner or down the alley. The eye explores and entreats the feet to follow.
And there is no more universal license to explore than a camera. As a tool and an accessory, it is a paradox. It makes you stand out and blend in; it takes you out of the picture and puts you squarely in the environment. Its product is at once documentary and interpretive. It is but a means to an end; tool but not result, license but not realization. The result and realization, the photographs themselves, are not simply what was there, but what the photographer chose to show and how they chose to show it. They are Magritte's pipe. They are the story. Ultimately, these stories are not about recording an event or a person or documenting the past, but about refreshing our perception of where we are and where we are going. They are not static; they are influenced by our evolving history, informed by our current understanding, and imbued with our current place. The goal is to bring that heightened perception home and, in looking again at these pictures, remember their stories, renew that excitement, and revive that awareness here and now. Hal Shinn
© Hal Shinn
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