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

Once symbols of the past, ruins have become ubiquitous signs of our future. Americans in the twenty-first century encounter ruins in the media on a daily basis--in images of abandoned factories and malls, toxic landscapes, devastating fires, hurricanes and floods. This sweeping study offers a new understanding of the spectacle of ruins in American 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 country’s past and envision its future.
    Empire of Ruins explains why Americans in the nineteenth century yearned for the ruins of Rome and Egypt and how they portrayed, in the remains of Native American cultures, a past as ancient and mysterious as the Old World's. As the romance of ruins gave way to the energies of capitalism in the twentieth century, older structures were demolished to make way for grander ones, a process that was interpreted by photographers and writers as a symptom of America's compulsive "creative destruction." In the wake of a late twentieth century global economy that was indifferent to local consequences, the book argues, Americans began to inhabit a perpetual state of ruins, made visible by photographers in images of decaying inner cities, derelict factories and malls, and the waste lands of the mining industry. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, Empire of Ruins focuses on how visual media have shaped the cultural meaning of ruins, including 9/11 and the atomic landscape, transforming disaster and decay into spectacles that compel our moral attention even as they balance horror and beauty. The book concludes by looking to the future and the crucial role the portrayal of climate ruins plays as we face the political and ethical responsibilities of our changing world.
   
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