Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction

by Miles Orvell

Overview

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans today encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods. In this sweeping study, Miles Orvell offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in US culture, exploring how photographers, writers, painters, and filmmakers have responded to ruin and destruction, both real and imaginary, in an effort to make sense of the past and envision the future. Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed a past as ancient and mysterious in the remains of Native American cultures. As the romance of ruins gave way to twentieth-century capitalism, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process interpreted by artists as a symptom of America's "creative destruction." In the late twentieth century, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographs of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. This interdisciplinary work focuses on how visual media have transformed disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. Looking to the future, Orvell considers the visual portrayal of climate ruins as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world. A wide-ranging work by an acclaimed urban, cultural, and photography scholar, Empire of Ruins offers a provocative and lavishly illustrated look at the American past, present, and future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190491628
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/06/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	106 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University. He is the author of The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, American Photography (OUP, 2003), and The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community. Orvell received the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement from the American Studies Association.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: The Romance of Ruins Chapter 2: Pueblo Utopias Chapter 3: Things Fall Apart: Modernity and Entropy Chapter 4: Creative Destruction Chapter 5: Destroying Modernity Chapter 6: The Atomic Landscape Chapter 7: The Industrial Landscape Chapter 8: The Apocalyptic Landscape Conclusion: Looking Backward and Looking Forward: The Course of Empire Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

"In this fascinating, wide-ranging examination of how photography constructs cultural meaning, Orvell reveals his intrigue with photography's ability to represent both the promise ruins once held and the demise that faces humans and the finality of death ... Including a strong scholarly apparatus, this book is a must read for the archaeologist and climate activist as well as students of photography." — J. Natal, CHOICE

"Orvell's fascination with how things acquire symbolic meaning continues with his self-proclaimed obsession with looking at ruins through photographs. In this fascinating, wide-ranging examination of how photography constructs cultural meaning, Orvell reveals his intrigue with photography's ability to represent both the promise ruins once held and the demise that faces humans and the finality of death. Orvell constructs an unconventional time line that begins with romantic, utopistic depictions of ruins built on photographs and paintings of the 19th century and moves into modernity and the present...with...photographs of ruins caused by climate change. Building a quiet, compelling undercurrent of images, Orvell argues that these photographs have become not just pictures of present-day ruins but clear-eyed images of the future....This book is a must read for the archaeologist and climate activist as well as students of photography. Highly recommended." — Choice

"A superb cultural historian of modernity and photographic representation, Miles Orvell has produced the definitive survey of depictions and interpretations of destruction and ruin from the nineteenth century to the present. The author proposes three successive modes of viewing ruins—from romantic meditations on the distant past, to the modern era's fascination with continuous demolition and renewal, to our current obsession with future destruction. Flawlessly argued, elegantly written, and illustrated with compellingly selected photographs, Empire of Ruins brings together an eclectic array of sources for interrogating the past and future of American empire." — Jeffrey L. Meikle, University of Texas at Austin

"In his latest book, the ever-readable cultural historian Miles Orvell examines a broad range of writers, painters, filmmakers, and photographers who have depicted ruins, both real and imaginary, as a means of fathoming the nature of recurring social crises. Orvell helps us see how decaying cities, abandoned factories, and polluted natural resources have historically been accepted by our leaders as the cost of doing business. This provocative analysis by one of America's finest practitioners of urban, cultural, and photographic studies reconsiders a once-vital topic that has itself fallen into ruins. His book restores the topic to its rightful place as our institutions and environment alike face the threat of irreversible decline." — David M. Lubin, author of Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War

"Ruins—from the decay of inner cities to natural and unnatural disasters—are an inescapable fact of American life.  This very fine book tackles a fascinating topic, covering a broad span of time in an admirably concise and compelling way. The main focus is on the built environment in the United States, from buildings to entire cities. No other book considers photography, ruin, and American culture so broadly." — Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine

"Orvell here proposes a genre—ruin photography—with its own aesthetics and morality, and persuasively argues that camera pictures of ruins in America have made us conscious of time in a particular way. He demonstrates how contemplating our own ruination might be just what we need right now." — Douglas Nickel, Brown University

"Empire of Ruins is about image-making; about ruins as motifs for various kinds of specialist or popular media...Orvell's book arrives at a moment when understanding the history, the lure, and the critical potential of ruin images will most certainly not become less urgent." — Jacob Birken, American Studies. A Quarterly, Vol. 68:3

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