Photographer Marks A City’s Memory

A room with no lights on, the only illumination coming from the windows. Tools hang on the walls. A window rotting in its frame. An abandoned wheelbarrow baking in the sun. These and many other images are the result of travels photographer William Frucht made to South America, where he turned his camera to the things people left behind.

The resulting show, ​“Cities & Memory,” runs at City Gallery on Upper State Street through May 26. Is it ruin porn?

For those of you thinking ​“ruin what?,” ruin porn is the facetious name given to the movement among photographers to take pictures of places, and often postindustrial places, in decay. About ten years ago, in the wake of the country’s financial collapse, the movement settled on Detroit’s abandoned houses and factories, and in particular the derelict Michigan Central Station; if you’ve seen pictures of its grand, crumbling, graffiti-riddled monumental architecture, that’s ruin porn.

Proponents of this type of photography say they’re documenting an historic transition, an important moment in time; one photographer described the abandoned buildings of Detroit as America’s Acropolis. To its detractors, ruin porn, well, fetishizes its subject and is in poor taste. They say that kind of photography asks us to find beautiful something that is the result of genuine human suffering — the jobs lost, the people displaced, a city falling on hard times.

Frucht’s artist statement makes his intentions plain. ​“The meaning of the past, its weight relative to the present, changes only on the scale of centuries. You feel this, perhaps unconsciously, the moment you set foot in a city,” he writes in an artist statement. ​“Along with the sounds, the language, the aroma, the past forms part of your immediate sense of the city’s unique self.” Frucht took the photographs in ​“Cities & Memory” in three locations. Two were Humberstone and Santa Laura, abandoned nitrate processing towns in northern Chile. The third was Recoleta Cemetery in downtown Buenos Aires. ​“Each is like William Faulkner’s South,” Frucht writes. ​“The past is not forgotten; it is not even past.”

Someone looking to accuse Frucht of making ruin porn could bypass this statement and start with the images themselves, which are striking beyond the ability of my reproductions here to capture. Frucht has an eye for both sharp contrasts — rusty metal against a vivid blue sky — and velvety subtleties, particularly in the way he gets the camera to render degrees of shadow in his Recoleta photos, and in the way the sparks of light pop out of the darkness of a shed in Humberstone. The composition always draws in the eye. They are aesthetically pleasing. But do they, as ruin porn’s detractors say, aestheticize their subject?

I’d argue no. There’s a difference between trying to capture the richness of color that the photographer sees, and enhancing that color beyond what is in nature. There’s a difference between asking the audience to pay attention to something and asking them to swoon over it. Frucht asks us to see his subjects as he sees them, and the details matter, a lot. They’re the information that Frucht’s photos impart, the words in the history book; they’re like the cracks in the sidewalk that get you wondering just how old that sidewalk is, and what cracked it.

That’s where Frucht’s mission comes alive, not in the overall emotional effect, but in the smaller moments in each picture that call attention to the absence of the people. Who used the tools on the wall? Who used the wheelbarrow? Why did that person stop, and when did they leave? Ruin porn detractors argue that it erases the people. In Frucht’s images, you wonder where they went.

“Cities and Memory” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through May 26. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.