{"id":6852,"date":"2014-03-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=6852"},"modified":"2014-03-13T07:35:05","modified_gmt":"2014-03-13T11:35:05","slug":"city-abandoned-may-be-the-title-but-vince-feldman-is-no-fence-hopping-hipster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2014\/03\/city-abandoned-may-be-the-title-but-vince-feldman-is-no-fence-hopping-hipster\/","title":{"rendered":"“City Abandoned” may be the title, but Vince Feldman is no fence-hopping hipster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Germantown Hall, 5928-5930 Germantown Avenue. (Vincent Feldman, Photographer, 1997)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Germantown Town Hall – Germantown Avenue and Haines Street. October 4, 1938. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the years, Vincent Feldman<\/a> has lovingly made 100+ photographs of Philadelphia at its worst. When he asked me to write about them for his book, <\/em>City Abandoned<\/a>, I agreed\u2014happily. And the result, officially published yesterday by Paul Dry Books, is quite beautiful.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to compare what Vince photographed, alongside what\u2019s here at PhillyHistory.org<\/a>. The two occasionally overlap, and here’s a selection of pairs that help us get at photographic intent. It\u2019s also interesting\u2014necessary, I think\u2014to consider Vince\u2019s point of view, and the greater tradition of imagemaking in which his work resides. <\/em><\/p>\n

What follows is an adapted excerpt from my essay in <\/em>City Abandoned, where I discuss how Vince\u2019s work may appear to be part of the new and popular tradition in urban photography that has come to be known as \u201cruin porn\u201d<\/em>\u2014but is something very different.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In City Abandoned,<\/em> Vincent Feldman asks us to step back from the Philadelphia we know\u2014its color, its sounds and smells\u2014and travel with him through a parallel world of rich tones, extraordinary compositions and grit-infused definition. Then he asks us to explore the city\u2019s past and its present on his<\/em> terms.<\/p>\n

Feldman never asks us to leave Philadelphia behind. To the contrary, his often beautiful and compelling images move us to a deeper feeling and understanding of the city, even as they pose important questions about our stewardship and the city\u2019s future. It\u2019s the story of a city on the edge, and we\u2019re glad to be along for this freeze-frame journey of photographic brinksmanship.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Ridge Avenue Farmers’ Market, 1810-1818 Ridge Avenue. Demolished, 1997 (Vincent Feldman, Photographer, 1995)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Farmer’s Market – Ridge Avenue at 18th Street, 1968 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

City Abandoned<\/em> celebrates dignity in the battered forms of sites and institutions. It acknowledges flaws and accumulated fragments in older signage (or in newer graffiti) in equal measure. Feldman works with irony but doesn\u2019t let irony cloud his approach; he\u2019s got much more to see and to express. In Feldman\u2019s compositions, symmetry becomes a strategy for taming reality, a measure of control over chaos. Deep inside the images, however, in detail far more revealing than observation on the street allows, we see evidence of disturbing disorder. These devices of composition and content are reminiscent of the works of Piranesi, or Escher. They are also reminiscent of the contemporary urban trend called \u201cruin porn.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

What, exactly, is the genre of ruin porn and how does it relate to Feldman\u2019s City Abandoned<\/em>?<\/p>\n

After decades of decline, de-industrialization, population shrinkage, and neglect, the urban landscape has taken on a familiar patina typical in many American cities. In the 1980s, long before the idea of ruin porn emerged, Camilo J. Vegara and others photographed decline as sociologists and documentarians. Only in July 2009 did Thomas Morton dub the genre \u201cruin porn\u201d in a blog post: Something, Something, Something, Detroit: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff<\/a>. <\/em>Then, thanks to the power of the internet and NPR\u2019s On The Media<\/a>, we suddenly found ourselves with a swirling new genre of urban imagery.<\/p>\n

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Ile Ife Museum, (formerly the Northern National Bank), 2300 Germantown Avenue, Ray Gouldey, September 1984. (PhillyHistory,org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Ile Ife Museum of Afro-American Culture, Germantown Ave. and Dauphin St. Demolished, 1997. (Vincent Feldman, Photographer, 1994)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cRuin porn,\u201d explained Peggy Nelson<\/a> at Hilobrow<\/em> in 2010, \u201cseeks the poignancy of abandonment, the presence and poetry of absence. It seeks the resonant sadness seeping from recent walls and lightly collapsed roofs, the unmet expectation of empty sidewalks broken through with weeds…\u201d Those who embrace what\u2019s called ruin porn \u201ccome for abandonment,\u201d writes Nelson, \u201cthey do not come for the abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that takes us to Detroit, perhaps America\u2019s most popular destination for abandonment. In 2011, John Patrick Leary<\/a> defined \u201cDetroitism\u201d as an \u201cexuberant connoisseurship of dereliction,\u201d an \u201cunembarrassed rejoicing at the \u2018excitement\u2019\u201d that every public building, every \u201cwindowless station has become a melancholy symbol of the city\u2019s transformation in death.\u201d The images and their audiences confirm the collective response: \u201cThe city is a shell.\u201d An interesting shell to explore, a compelling one to photograph, but a shell nonetheless.<\/p>\n

The ruin porn movement is not really about photography. It\u2019s not about history and it\u2019s certainly not about the future. These photographs may be well crafted, but \u201cwhat counts, even more than the quality of the image\u201d wrote bfp at the Feministe<\/a><\/em> blog in 2011, \u201cis dramatic presentation and, like the better-known form of pornography, \u2018the nakedness of the subject.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Ruin pornographers tend to be voyeuristic, which Feldman is not. They are not particularly concerned with quality, which Feldman is. His dedication to composition, to scale and detail, his choice of black and white, his commitment to large format photography, aligns more closely with the 19th<\/sup>-century landscapes of Timothy O\u2019Sullivan, Carlton Watkins or the cityscapes of John Moran<\/a>, than the work of fence-hopping hipsters intent on displaying decay on flickr or tumblr.<\/p>\n

Feldman is also in the urban hunt-and-capture game, but his discourse with subjects, his visual treatise, is more that of stakeholder than trespasser. Feldman\u2019s images raise deeper questions about responsibility. He uses his art \u201cto get to the root of the idea that the American city is sick.\u201d Feldman is an insider, a visual investigator taking in the whole of the city, year after year, asking questions that grow increasingly more penetrating.<\/p>\n

If there are any<\/em> similarities between Feldman\u2019s photographs and those made by the practitioners of ruin porn, it is in the realm of social commentary. Feldman agrees that Philadelphia, like Detroit, \u201chas had a leg kicked out from under it,\u201d but he considers ruin porn \u201csmothering.\u201d He believes it brands the city as a place to avoid engagement, when, in fact, Philadelphia isn\u2019t a ghost town, and its citizens aren\u2019t zombies. Philadelphia is a city with a utopian legacy that remembers its past and its purpose.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the years, Vincent Feldman has lovingly made 100+ photographs of Philadelphia at its worst. When he asked me to write about them for his book, City Abandoned, I agreed\u2014happily. And the result, officially published yesterday by Paul Dry Books, is quite beautiful. It\u2019s interesting to compare what Vince photographed, alongside what\u2019s here at PhillyHistory.org. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}