Beauty in Ruined Things
There are some pictures that every photographer, on acquiring their first camera, must get out of their system. A long exposure shot of headlights on the highway at night. A black and white photo of rubbish in some abandoned alleyway.
And broken glass.
Or, perhaps, rusted metal.
Or peeling paint, eroded brickwork, decomposed leaves in fall.
These images of decay are always close-up, intimate, abstract. The newbie photographer shoots broken windows and rusted chainlink like some tourist, visiting Rome for the first time, taking in ruined monument after ruined monument, creating a mental catalogue, a travel diary, a photo-book, whatever, some memento of the toll that time extracts from empire.
I did these things myself.
Some years ago, when my camera was still brand new, I filled memory cards with images of broken windows, the spiderweb patterns of fracture lines—their fractal geometry.
This was my first serious attempt to study the way things fall apart.
And so many years earlier—before I was an artist—I made my own journey to the Roman ruins, a pilgrimage to see the great broken things of this world.
And I remember the night I sat in the remains of some Roman structure—a nameless bit of crumbling foundation, not important enough to merit an admission fee—and finished a bottle of wine with a stranger. The woman had sat across from me on the train that morning and we’d struck up a conversation that led to a dinner. I remember that she had stolen two wine glasses from the restaurant were we dined. At the time, this gesture seemed almost inconceivably classy—I would have been more than happy to drink from the bottle.
Later that night we’d fuck, each desperately trying to extricate ourselves from some toxic relationship. Afterwards we stood together under the shower head in the hostel, let the cold water pour over us, washed away the sweat and semen and saliva, fucked again, and parted ways.
At the door she asked me if I remembered her name.
I returned to this subject—the study of ruin—many times in my career as an artist. I matured, developed my voice, stopped photographing broken windows, found a different approach to thinking about decay and its attendant beauty.
I never returned to Rome.
I remember almost nothing from that trip.
But I remembered her name—the stranger from that night amongst the ruins.
And this, too, was a subject I would return to many times.
Baudelaire’s (in)famous poem A Carcass details the artist’s experience of stumbling across a dead animal while on a romantic stroll with his lover. On the most obvious level the poem is an ode to the unlikely beauty of dead things. It is also a meditation on mortality; the final few stanzas make the observation that our narrator's beautiful lover will, in time, be like the fetid rotting corpse they witnessed on that fine summer morning. But I think that the poem is also about the artistic process; Baudelaire seems to convey a sense that artistic beauty often blossoms from death and decay. There is something self-referential here; Baudelaire is not only appreciating the aesthetic beauty of the dead animal, he’s also noting that it was the discovery of this corpse would eventually give rise to his own beautiful poem, and to many more like it.
This composition—like Baudelaire’s poem, like the text above—is about the idea that beauty can spring forth from ruin and decay.
It’s worth telling the end of my story, what came after that night in the ruins.
I came home from that trip with the courage and conviction I needed to break free from the toxic relationship I was entangled in. And I kept in contact with the stranger from the ruins. There were more trips, more bottles of wine shared between us, more nights together. We grew closer and, in time, found ourselves living in the same city. We got married, started a family, carved a happy life together out of the ruins of what had come before.
I think a lot about Baudelaire’s poem, his ideas about finding beauty in ruin and decay. I try to keep these ideas at the forefront on my mind. Some days it’s easier than others. On the chattering screen they’re updating the numbers, counting how many dead and in what country. They’re burying corpses in mass graves. Militia men armed with machine guns are storming capitol buildings, harassing doctors and nurses, chanting conspiracies about cellphone towers and bat soup and mind-control microchips embedded in fraudulent vaccines. A prominent New York ER doctor, overwhelmed by the onslaught, took her own life. In a Georgia suburb a jogger was hunted down by two men in a pickup truck—vigilantes who imagined he might be a robber—and shot to death on the street. The ethnicities of all parties involved are depressingly easy to guess. The poles of our planet are turning to slush and half the world stands poised to tumble into fascism and there is no serious opposition to either of these developments. In Toronto’s gay village, a few weeks ago, a man doused himself in gasoline, lit the match. Police were called. He was tased, detained, and died of his injuries in hospital later that day. And as far as I can tell nobody knows what he intended to protest with this act. The man died, suffering in agony few of us will ever understand, in service of some message that no journalist thought worthy of coverage. And so on… The news cycle plods on, the screen keeps chattering. They keep on counting the dead.
I try to keep Baudelaire’s message at the forefront on my mind and sometimes it’s difficult. But there are also moments when it’s easy to see the beauty amongst the decay: the rich red tones of flesh and flowers, the texture of mummified skin sloughing off bone, the woman standing amidst the ruins of Roman architecture and failed relationships.
Although I don’t take pictures of broken windows anymore, I still think they’re beautiful. And peeled paint, rusted metal, eroded brickwork.
Some days it’s easier than others to find the beauty.
I try to savour the good days.