Beautiful detritus or a grim reminder of what has become of one of America’s most important cities?

Detroit was once the fourth largest city in the United States. It is now the 18^th most populous due to a massive population bleed that started in the 1960s and became a hemorrhage in the past decade. Census figures show that from 2000 to 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of its population. Once upon a time, 44 percent of the Metro area’s population resided within city limits. Today, that figure hovers at just 18 percent.

It has been enjoying a hipster renaissance of late, and is a darling for the urban farming movement. Nevertheless, the fact remains: Motor City is in a state of post-decline, primed to be built again or razed and reinvented entirely.

In the meantime, the remains of more than 70,000 abandoned buildings stand undead in the city: They are standing, if by a skeletal frame, but void of familial and community life. They stand rather like apparitions; ghastly specters of a Great American Dreamscape turned burial ground. For that, they are striking. But are they beautiful?

I touched base with Kevin Bauman, creator of the photographic essay 100 Abandoned Houses, to discern just that.

Photojournalists and artists have been making pilgrimages to Detroit to capture its haunting detritus for years, notably New York photographer Andrew Moore and Parisians Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Bauman, however, is a local.

Having grown up in the Detroit Metro area, Bauman started photographing the abandoned houses in the mid-90s as both a creative exercise and a way of understanding what was happening to his native city.

“How could a city in the United States of America be in such a bad state?” he asked himself, thinking, “This is absurd or some sort of sad joke.”

He initially focused on the Brush Park area on the outskirts of Detroit’s entertainment district. The area has since been redeveloped with the construction of new sporting arenas, lofts and condos. Bauman turned his camera on the remaining 135 square miles of Detroit that was left untouched and ignored by developers. He switched from photographing in black and white to color and adopted a more documentary style.

Eventually, people started asking for prints and now his work hangs in galleries (currently on exhibit at the Victor Lope Arte Contemporaneo in Barcelona).

“At first, I didn’t feel right selling pictures of the houses because that was what people had to live with,” he says. “If you have to look at these abandoned houses every day and live across the street from them, you don’t see any beauty in them.”

The eeriness of being in an urban area and hearing nothing save for the howl of a roaming dog (warning: graphic video) unnerved Bauman, as well. During his photographic expeditions he’s encountered 20 foot high piles of toilets, houses with their facades ripped off completely, entire floors stuffed with garbage, and – the lifeblood of any city – concerned citizens.

“In respect to the people that live there and want to live there, I hope my project makes people want to learn more about Detroit.”

Mayor David Bing has announced plans to bulldoze large swathes of the city; meanwhile, the abandoned structures serve as eyesores to neighbors, nefarious playgrounds for criminals, and art canvases for others.

You can buy prints from Bauman’s Abandoned Houses series through his website. He donates a third of his proceeds to Habitat for Humanity Detroit and The Greening of Detroit.

Images: Kevin Bauman; Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

How porn has become the slang term for everything from food to literature to ruin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about masturbation lately. Wait, don’t go! Don’t get the wrong idea; I’ve been a model, PG-13-rated citizen over the past nine days. (And I’m an unwed dude anyway, I’m entitled.) But since writing about Detroit, Michigan, and so-called “ruin porn” last week, a conversation has developed about the definition of pornography and, more specifically, about the proclivity of the professional commentariat to expand that definition on a rhetorical whim.

Defined as “The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings,” the English word “pornography” first appeared in 1842 in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. The word was classified under an umbrella of “lower classes of art” along with “rhyparography,” a 1678-vintage word that means “The painting of (or writing about) distasteful or sordid subjects.”

That Smith’s Dictionary chose to separate pornography from rhyparography in 1842 is interesting. In 1841, British inventor and photographer William Henry Fox Talbot developed the calotype, an advancement in photographic technology that made possible the reproduction of multiple copies of a single negative. (The calotype’s predecessor, the dauguerreotype, could only make one copy of a photograph.) Though it may be coincidental that the development of the calotype in 1841 was followed by the coinage of the word “pornography” in 1842, the relationship of mass-production and porn is still significant. Whether or not the calotype actually led to the pornography neologism is unimportant; the invention of the former nonetheless made possible the invention of the latter. It is, after all, lot more difficult to defend the aesthetic integrity of this, a one-off, than it is this, the best-selling adult movie of all time.

So after 164 years of rhyparography, it would seem, it wasn’t enough simply to declare a work of art sordid or distasteful; by the nineteenth century and the publication of Smith’s Dictionary, the intent of the rhyparographer had necessarily come into play. What’s more, “pornography” is derived from the Greek word for prostitution, which adds the tawdry patina of economics to a hitherto purely leisurely pursuit.

It was one thing to portray or chronicle acts of love and other such nonsense; it was quite another to do so with the aims of reproduction and sale to as many people as possible. But the mass-production and economic exploitation of something – erotic or not – don’t make it porn. Moreover, it creates a standard that leads to the definition of all two-dimensional art (and literature) as pornography.

In 1955, the concept of “pornography of violence”- the first nonsexual use of the word – was born. American philosopher Abraham Kaplan declared, “The pornography of violence is more widespread in our culture than all the other categories of obscenity put together.” Kaplan’s use of the word “pornography” – when “problem,” “phenomenon,” or “portrayal,” would have worked – is puzzling. If you return to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of pornography – “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity…” – it doesn’t even make rhetorical sense.

True, sex and violence are thoroughly intertwined in mind and body, but the two tropes – fucking and fighting – are so elemental to humanity that it would make more sense to use different terms to describe their employment as titillating, non-aesthetic material. Eating and drinking go together, but hunger is a physical sensation and philosophical concept completely distinct from thirst, and we label and define it as such. The conflation of sex and violence into one monolithic urge, though, is an oversimplification ripe for abuse; Kaplan’s precedent allows for anything remotely sexual (or sexy) to be hastily linked to sexuality, and thus to pornography. Hence, “ruin porn,” “ego porn,” and “food porn.”

What’s more, Kaplan, intentionally or not, by definition removes the aesthetic component from something when he describes it as porn. To take food porn as an example, is one expected to display comestibles as aesthetically unappealing as possible to avoid any taint of titillation? The term “food porn” doesn’t just link style to sex, it equates the the two. Is this pornography because it’s beautiful? National Park sex, anyone?

The British media has taken to classifying certain kinds of memoir as “misery porn,” and the personal pleasure one gets from reading – hitherto lauded as a low-tech, cerebral benefit – is now subject to critical (and implicitly criminal) judgment by the chattering class. Across the pond, finding value in a memoirist’s literary treatment of past sexual abuse, for example, makes one a closet pedophile, or at least a pervert. “Pedophiles are down there with the Nazis and Judas as all-time bad folk,” novelist Gerry Feehily told the BBC in 2007, “so these stories are easy on the writer, easy on the reader. Most of us not being pedophiles, we are in a comfort zone with these books, where we feel edified and also morbidly thrilled.” I can only speak for myself, but pedophilia does not put me in a comfort zone and is, in fact, quite the opposite of titillating for me.

But misery porn titles sell in the millions, presumably to people who have access to far more explicit forms of salacious material, like actual porn. Nevertheless, if something is deemed to have been enjoyed too much by too many people (or if it has earned its creator too much money), it runs the risk of falling victim to a critic’s urge to call it porn. (Disclosure: I enjoy MTV’s Jersey Shore – perhaps too much – and I admit to having once described it as “ego porn” in a review).

Ironically, if our culture is indeed engaged in a prurient “race to the bottom,” then it’s in great measure due to critics’ bizarrely priggish appetite to keep raising that “bottom” to higher and higher strata of perceived decency. These days, anything bright, anything provocative, or anything that eschews stripped-down Modernism in favor of something more decorative is called pornography.

If you want to stamp out pornography, then widening the scope of the definition to include non-sexual material is the wrong way to go about it. Pornography can’t be watered down into oblivion. Salacious art isn’t The Phantom Tollbooth’s (a must-read, modern-day Alice by Norton Juster), Subtraction Stew (A consumer grows hungrier with each bite), and inventing more things at which to tsk-tsk doesn’t make real porn go away.

Image source: Flickr

A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

Ruin porn is a nasty thing and yet our objectification of all thing crumbling and abandoned is strong. Detroit, the largest city in the state of Michigan is the American automobile industry’s main squeeze. How can the home of Motown music legacies and Motor City mechanics be in such decay? You Know It When You See It takes a closer look.

Mobile social platforms are hot right now and a sustainable fashion app? Right up our alley. Writer Rowena Ritchie interviews GreenGlamGo founder, Clarissa Nicola, about her company’s new green fashion finder app in Sustainable Fashion? There’s An App For That.

We’ve seen too much of Charlie Sheen of late, but when it comes to celebrity consciousness, a star can take a cause a long way. George Clooney – who is certainly easier on the eyes – has a long and storied list of social activism. “Despite his involvement in bringing the Darfur genocide to light, he considers it ‘the greatest failure of my life’ – because little changed after he and his father smuggled cameras into a refugee camp to bring to light the horrors committed against an entire nation.” In Katherine Butler’s column, George Clooney Vs. Charlie Sheen: Welcome To Shade Grown Hollywood, we look at Hollywood without the rose-colored sunglasses.

We launched the new series Places & Spaces this week, and they all depict amazing representations of those idyllic places we all dream of and hope to go to. Shelter editor Leigha Oaks takes us on a visual vacation, first stop: Juvet Landscape Hotel.

The Hyde Amendment was passed in 1976. If you’ve never heard of it, Hyde ensures that federal money is not used to fund abortions on military bases, in Planned Parenthood facilities or anyplace else. “Anti-choice politicians and activists have spent a lot of time over the last few months making sure that there’s confusion about how government dollars are used to fund abortions. Here’s the quick answer: they’re not,” explains Libby Lowe. In Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…And Don’t You Dare Get Pregnant, we learn the most intrusive employer of all might just be the U.S. government.

All right, we can’t resist one more…

Has your gardening habit yielded yet another bumper crop of squash or greens you can’t give away fast enough? Plenty of people have the same problem and they’re turning the veggie surplus into a profitable cottage industry. In The Green Plate: Is Urban Farming The Next Green Cottage Industry? we get the update on how the urban farming legalization trend is sweeping the country, and putting green not just in our mouths, but in our wallets.

Image: Michael Ruiz

Ruin porn and the objectification of Detroit.

Can someone explain to me what, exactly, “ruin porn” is? Recently, it’s been linked to Detroit, most notably in Chrysler’s now-legendary Super Bowl ad. How is ruin porn, which Detroit-born-and-raised writer Paul Clemens describes in his new book Punching Out as “the arty delectation of Detroit’s destruction,” any different from Chilean Miners Porn? Or 2011 Egyptian Revolution Porn? Or Portland, Oregon, Porn? Anything worth shooting, it would seem, is potential pornography. Yet critics are slinging the ruin porn term around, conflating genuine interest and concern with insatiable horniness. What gives?

I understand that there is something of an exploitative aspect to the visual documentation of Motown’s decline, a rubbernecking yet relieved sentiment solicited and received by Gothic depictions of wreck and ruin – but provocative isn’t porno. Good photography commands pathos; great photography demands it, and right now, Detroit requires our attention. But how the act of paying attention got mixed up with masturbation is a mystery to me. Am I watching Google Porn every time I check Gmail? Are you? Please, dear reader, close your inbox and pull your hand out of your pants.

Detroit, Michigan, circa 2011, is the most emotive, pathetic, and photogenic subject in America right now. The city’s vacant lots, shuttered automotive plants, and abandoned houses are fascinating and horrifying, and we can’t turn away. But does insatiable consumer demand or instinctual human curiosity suddenly transform something into porn?

What’s more, the assumption that any art – verbal or visual – inspired by the Motor City is pornographic is a slap in the face to anyone who’s ever tried to affect positive change in the world via words or images; i.e., writers and artists. No one ever accused Solzhenitsyn of writing gulag porn or Margaret Mitchell of antebellum porn. Things aren’t so rosy in Detroit right now; Americans should see what’s happening to a great city.

Mother Jones derides Chrysler for utilizing “the cynical racism (or at least colonialism) of positioning Chrysler as a tough, gritty, 8 Mile-style brand that’s perfect for what marketers call the ‘urban core’ demographic; and using Detroit poverty porn to hawk [its] product while simultaneously trying to deride the media’s recent Detroit poverty porn.” (For the moment, we’ll set aside the incongruity that it’s okay for MoJo to mock Chrysler for perpetrating “poverty porn” out of one side of its mouth while promoting its own version out of the other.)

First of all, it’s incredibly naive to fault a failing (or failed) corporation’s attempt to re-brand and re-introduce itself to a new generation of consumers. True, Chrysler’s modus operandi over the last half-century seems to have been “How not to run a business,” and true, the ailing automaker should probably have been put to sleep and made to suffer the consequences of its managerial idiocy. But whether or not you think Chrysler deserved its $15 billion in bailout funds, the fact of the matter is that it did indeed receive them, ostensibly to keep manufacturing cars and to provide some kind of lifeline to the Motor City. And whether or not you think those new cars are classic Chrysler POS’s, the fact of the matter is that they need to be sold to someone. There’s an entire generation of Honda drivers to convert, yet Mother Jones expects Detroit to do so with tail fins, muscle cars, and depictions of Hank Greenberg-era Tigertown.

Secondly, the advertisement seeks to glorify Detroit, not wallow in its decline. There are no cheap Coney Island hot dog joints here, no bombed out buildings. “Imported From Detroit” promotes Motown as the city of Joe Louis; of the Larry Callahan & Selected of God choir; of Eminem. If that’s pornography, then so is this. Chrysler bet $9 million – a Super Bowl record – on their two-minute spot; it was seen by 111 million viewers during the most-watched spectacle in American television history, and as I write, the viral video has gotten more than 9 million hits on YouTube.  “Likes” outnumber “dislikes” by more than 20 to 1.  “Imported From Detroit” is easily the most discussed television advertisement since last year’s epic “Write the Future” campaign from Nike.

There’s no outcry over “Marilyn Porn” when Vanity Fair puts the long-deceased Ms. Monroe on its cover twice in two years (I’ve had magazines reject pitches because editors have deemed them too similar to articles published six years prior), yet there’s virtually no argument to be made about her contemporary newsworthiness (or lack thereof). Graydon Carter knows enough about magazines and marketing to give his customers what they want; is he a pornographer, too?

Image: JSFauxtaugraphy

“Real Americans Buy American.” Growing up in the Motor City in the 1970s, that ubiquitous message, proudly displayed on the rear bumpers of so many Mustangs, Caddies and Pontiacs led this young man to wonder what the problem was. If the red, white and blue declarative were true, why would the Detroit Free Press be running what seemed to be a serialized front-page obituary for our town and our industry? Why would that big black number in The News’ headline have so many zeros after it? (How many people were laid off yesterday?) As near as I could tell, there were plenty of Americans around, and if they did what those bumper stickers told me they do, why was Detroit blight central rather than the boomtown my parents grew up in?

Eventually I learned the truth: Real Americans don’t buy American. Real Americans buy what they want.

This bitter truth periodically hits Detroit hard, and each time one has to wonder if the American auto industry’s hubris has led to its final death knell. I watched firsthand the slow motion response of the Big Three to real world energy and design challenges and the resulting economic devastation of the mid- and late-70s, and again in the late-80s and early-90s (when my parents lost their home and the family’s electrical supply business). Today, watching from my safe haven of California, I read stories of urban dystopia and (literally) scorched earth, the only hope being an unusually creative, industrious and determined population.

But once again, and like always it seems, there’s a blip in the flatline. Could there be life?

As Detroit’s North American International Auto Show enters its 23rd year as an international event, the city’s hometown industry isn’t looking so bad. Last year, reports Business Insider , saw Ford get back its number-two U.S. automaker slot after having lost that position to decelerating Toyota, while the top three fastest-growing brands were from General Motors. “Even Chrysler — a company once left for dead — gained U.S. market share and closed the gap with Honda, despite having a dearth of new models versus its well-stocked Japanese competitors.” (Tangentially, Business Insider, probably a good idea to can the “Pearl Harbor in reverse” rhetoric. It’s a bad week for kill-the-enemy hyperbole.)

Here’s more good news from the Wall Street Journal: Ford announced that it’s going to hire 7,000 workers and is expected to report that 2010 was one of the most profitable years in its 100-plus-year history. Meanwhile, GM says it had a strong end to the year, finishing with more than $20 billion in liquidity and that it expects to hire more U.S. workers if annual sales meet their expected forecasts. As for offerings, reports the Journal, the “40 new vehicles that will be unveiled represent an increase from 27 new models that debuted at the 2010 edition of the show… Chrysler will show off 13 models in addition to the 300 that have been completely redesigned or significantly overhauled. GM will show the Sonic and a compact Buick. Ford will feature a compact minivan based on the European C-Max model, as well as a battery-powered version of its Focus.”

Could the Big Three be getting it? Are they finally giving Americans what they want? Consider that this better-than-okay news is emerging from a horrifying industry free fall that began in 2008 and featured the bankruptcy reorganizations of GM and Chrysler in 2009. “Last year’s show had a funereal feel—spartan displays, sparse attendance, few of the lights, loud music and theatrical unveilings that had become the show’s trademark,” reports the WSJ. So keep in mind from where this upbeat news is coming from. When there’s nowhere to go but up, you won’t be penalized for thinking that any movement is good movement.

It also remains to be seen if this upswing is the result of a slow but sure economic surge that has buyers beginning to make those big purchases they put off for so long. Whether or not new offerings and reconfigured corporate structures will have the impact everyone hopes for won’t be determined in the immediate future. But one thing’s for certain; the old adage is true: “when the nation catches a cold, Detroit gets pneumonia.” The thing is, for the infirm, pneumonia can be fatal. And for Detroit, that adage isn’t funny anymore.

Image: country_boy_shane

Mention Detroit and most people will immediately think about the auto industry or music. Not many would think urban farmland. But that’s exactly what Hantz Group, a Michigan-based financial group, is thinking.

The group has been putting together an ambitious and creative plan to turn large acres of underutilized and vacant inner city land into farmland featuring a mixture of cash crops, ornamental gardens and riding trails.

The Hantz Group, with their Hantz Farms subsidiary, hopes to begin with a 70-acre purchase on the city’s east side, an area that was selected due to its low population density of between zero and nine residents per acre. Working with researchers from Michigan State University, Hantz Farms will determine which crops would be suitable for the land, aiming wherever possible to plant edible crops. Land that has been degraded through industrial use, however, will only be planted with non-edible crops such as Christmas trees.

Ultimately, the Hantz Group is looking at turning up to 10,000 acres of inner city Detroit into urban farmland. In a city riddled with real estate dereliction and economic woes, large scale urban gardens may be just the thing to help get Detroit back in the fast lane.

Image: LHOON