Why I photograph Modern Ruins - Shaun O'Boyle

The Modern Ruins series of photographic essays is an ongoing project I have been working on since the mid 1980’s, during my college years. But what are at the roots of this decidedly odd interest in old decrepit moldering buildings? Why spend vacations voluntarily locked up in an old jail or penitentiary? Why drive 400 miles to spend a weekend in a crumbling coal mine or rusting steel mill when I could be out drinking and watching the game? What is the attraction?

Much of my photographic work tends to be a process of discovery. It is a way of mapping unknown territories, exploring subjects and locations I am curious about and want to come to terms with. It is a process of understanding the character of a place, of discovering the memories that are written in the structure. Photography is a way of exploring and seeing, a way of ordering and making sense of something that, up until then, I didn't understand.

Why is a rusting and crumbling building interesting (is it in fact interesting, or is it just me?). I find a visual beauty to these structures that transcends their past utility.
I am often awed at the extremes that are gone through to achieve an end. Some of the projects I have photographed, like the steel mills, the coal mines, the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, delineate extraordinary tasks that were achieved by man. These are projects of such overwhelming complexity that it is hard to imagine their being carried out successfully. These photographs are, in part, a study of mans ability to go beyond his own scale to achieve an end. It is an exploration of the means to that end, a detailed look at the mechanisms that made something larger possible.

My interest in these subjects began early, and come from a variety of interests. Probably my early interests in travel and carpentry (my father was a carpenter, and I often his unwilling apprentice) eventually lead me to related larger subjects, like visiting the great architecture of Europe. With pennies saved from a summer carpentry job, I was able to travel to Europe and North Africa between high school and college. I had the extraordinary opportunity to explore and photograph catacombs, cathedrals, monasteries, temples, and pyramids in Italy, Greece, and Egypt. I was fascinated with these rich ruins, bathed in history. It was fantastic to experience these places first hand, until then they were as distant as a lesson in history class. This trip confirmed a real interest in architecture and ruins, and eventually led to the modern ruins photographic project.

I worked at the very large Avondale Shipyard in New Orleans between high school and college. I lasted about 4 months at the job, which was surprising considering how much I disliked the work, how dangerous it was, and how long the twelve hour night shifts dragged on. The work consisted of jobs like pumping bilge water out of ships on dry-dock, clambering around in the smoke filled catacomb depths of a ship after the welders had been there working all day, picking up scraps of steel, running compressor hoses, electrical lines, hosing down and scrubbing the cargo holds, erecting scaffolding up fifty or more feet so the ship could be sand blasted and painted. Worse was having nothing to do, and sitting around in a ship at 2:30 am, over three hours until the shift was over, trying to stay awake. But, despite this, I was fascinated with the place. There were moments at the yard when I was absolutely enthralled with the process of working on these massive ships. One particularly interesting job was setting up the dry dock with blocks in the shape of the hull of a large tanker ship, then sinking the dock into the brown muddy waters of the Mississippi River, centering the ship over it, and then floating the entire ship out of the water on the dock; it was an amazing sight to see. There were huge cranes everywhere, moving materials, and people, all over the yard. I carried an instamatic camera with me, and would occasionally take snapshots of the ships, or the muddy Mississippi at sunset. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a lifelong interest.
Since then I have had an interest in sites of the same scale and complexity. To be able to walk the large steel yards, like Bethlehem Steel, and see these places, on an even larger scale than the shipyard, warms the cockles of my heart. It brings back the experiences I had at the shipyard. I can still recall the oily muddy smell of the Mississippi River at night, a smell I will never forget, and a smell that many large industrial sites seem to share.

My interest in ruined sites is closely linked to my interest in places where history can still be experienced and explored. A lot of the early ruins photography took place simultaneous with my architectural studies, and there are parallels between them. I remember a visiting lecturer mentioning that he was looking forward to seeing his buildings in ruin, that he had considered how the structure would look in ruin when he was designing them. I began to see ruins as non functioning architecture, closer to sculpture than architecture, since the function and utility of the structure was no longer there. I wasn't interested in designed ruins, but the real thing, and of any flavor, industrial, institutional, residential, marine, academic, religious. The key was authenticity, closely followed by the requirement of the site being pristine, meaning relatively untouched since it was abandoned. What I was after were the details of the lives that used to occupy those spaces, a sense of the presence of the former occupants, I was looking for the memory of the architecture and spaces, something written into the structure that told of past events and moments.

I became interested in the signs and symbols of habitation, an interest sparked by a few different sources, primarily from reading Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and studying semiotics. Bachelard's book The Poetics of Space was key for me to start seeing that buildings and architectural spaces are actually more than the sum of their parts, that there are intimacies and experiences that we have with the houses and rooms that we grew up in that are deep rooted, and are a core part of our experiences. Memories and dreams are strongly rooted in architectural spaces. I look to unlock some of those memories in my photography, and touch on common collective memories and experiences. I see rooms, objects and details within rooms as keys to understanding the memory of a place, as touchstones to other experiences of that space.

Shaun O'Boyle 05/09

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