Introduction
In their important edited collection Beyond the Ruins, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott return several times to the theme of nostalgia that they fear is in danger of crowding out more critical attempts to make sense of the deindustrialization process in the US. They speak of preventing a “creeping industrial nostalgia from dominating the debate,”Footnote 2 creating what they memorably label “smokestack nostalgia.” As they say, “we have to strip industrial work of its broad-shouldered, social-realist patina and see it for what it was: tough work that people did because it paid well and it was located in their communities.”Footnote 3 Those of us interested in labor and working-class history also have to confront this danger of sentimentalizing the past. In our enthusiasm to recognize working-class heritage and find value in it, we also have to be aware of what is potentially problematic there. As Kate Dudley noted more than a decade and a half ago in comparing anthropological studies of primitive societies and those of communities being deindustrialized:
This form of lament is not limited to anthropological writings about non-Western societies caught in the grip of brutalizing “development” and “modernizing” programs. The rhetorical bells toll just as dolorously in the newly emerging ethnography of deindustrialization. As titles like Rusted Dreams or The Magic City suggest, American industrial workers are also subject to the kind of historicizing and romanticizing imagery that characterizes nostalgic treatments of more distant but nonetheless passing ways of life.Footnote 4
One aspect of this “smokestack nostalgia” is the growing number of coffee table books and other publications on abandoned industrial plant and buildings. Often these collections are related to, or the products of, the urban explorer movement.Footnote 5 What has been created is a rich and powerful collection of highly aestheticized portrayals which have themselves attracted sustained criticism. For example, in Punching Out, his recent book charting the process of dismantling a Detroit auto factory over the course of a year, Paul Clemens derides this postindustrial aesthetic: “The arty delectation of Detroit's destruction—“ruin porn,” as it's called—it sometimes seems to take up half the internet.”Footnote 6 Throughout his book Clemens displays a simmering anger about the reality of lost industry and industrial destruction and what he seems to interpret as an over-aestheticized trivialization of ruins by the various parts of the urban explorer movement. Clemens is a native Detroiter and views “spelunkers” as lacking care, authenticity and respect for what they fetishize. In the final chapter of Punching Out, Clemens reflects on the redundancy of an anti-trespassing noting:
… there were similar signs posted on the property of closed plants all over the city, and the urban spelunkers still got inside and snapped their pictures. The artistes were sure to come around to the corner of Charlevoix and Conner avenues as well, armed with telephoto lenses, French theory, and poetic notions. Another ruin to roam and photograph, Budd would be their plant soon enough.”Footnote 7
Clemens condemnation is a powerful critique of what he takes to be outsiders’ inauthenticity. For Clemens their photographic equipment speaks of voyeurism, their French theory of their abstraction, and their poetry connotes a detachment from the lived reality of Detroiters. Each of these attributes speaks of a carefree elite disposition untroubled by and oblivious to the social and economic problems manifest in the ruins they explore. However, this may, or may not say more about Clemens himself than it does about spelunkers he is critical of.
A similar unease with this trend imbues the work of Canadian historian Steven High. His consideration of what he calls the “Industrial Sublime” links urban explorers and more artistic readings of ruin. High invokes the specter of nostalgia in his critique, talking of “this nostalgia for vanishing landmarks,” or the “museumification” of industrial landscapes and, as he writes: “In recent years, a flurry of coffee table books has also appeared, celebrating everything from the vanishing “Wheat Kings” (country grain elevators) to the “Industrial Cathedrals of the North” (mine headframes).”Footnote 8
High's critique has two targets. His first is the urban explorers who he reads in and through class. Likening contemporary spelunkers to eighteenth-century elites on the European Grand Tour, he emphasizes their outsider status, their ability to “other” the strange industrial world they visit. Former workplaces of the working class are transformed into exotic locales, a form of “dark tourism” for the middle classes. The second target High has in his sights is the trend towards the academic aestheticization of “ruins” by authors such as British cultural geographer Tim Edensor, widely known for his influential Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Footnote 9 In both instances, High objects to the way former industrial space is shorn of context, be that political or corporate, and especially the way in which these landscapes are depopulated, in the sense that there is no space for reading these as work sites and areas of struggle, as places constructed and destroyed by capitalism and class interest. In essence, what is problematic is the radical disinterest in what these places used to be and the people who once populated them. There is a casual indifference to what became of the people laid off as a result of industrial change and the original material purpose of the built environment, which is now fetishized for its aesthetic value to the exclusion of all else—as one of Michael Zadoorian's fictional characters describes it: “uber-urban, echt-industrial, proto-apocalyptic, rustbelt cool.”Footnote 10
We have here a group of commentators united in their unease with what they see as the uncritical celebration of an industrial past, be it the romanticized remembrance of working life or the aesthetic objectification of that era's material remains. In the rest of this piece I want to think through some of these issues and, in the process, offer a critical reading which nonetheless attempts to find a more positive account of what these manifestations of nostalgia for an industrial past might mean. The article first examines the literature that has emerged in this field, in particular the image-driven “coffee table” collections of industrial decay. It then goes on to make sense of these publications, questioning both their production and their audience. It develops and deploys a critical reading of nostalgia to attempt to understand what is being celebrated, lamented and mourned here. Drawing on ideas of loss and obituary, as well as a range of visual methods and approaches, it suggests a framework for seeing this broad category of cultural artifacts in new and productive ways. It is my argument that a more generous critical cultural reading of these manifestations of crumbling cultures allows us to understand both contemporary assumptions about work, industry and class while also throwing new light on historical industrial culture itself.
This essay has important implications for labor historians in terms of how they engage with their subject matter—substantively, theoretically and methodologically. It is important that we develop an adequate language for dealing with the complex ways in which industrial culture is marked and remembered, concealed and erased, recognizing that this memorialization is the work of many hands across time and space.
The Dimensions of the New Deindustrial Sublime
So what are we talking about when we discuss “smokestack nostalgia”? Often the actual targets of criticism are vague. I want to begin by mapping out what we might look at here as exemplars of this trend—local or industrial histories; academic studies which combine words and pictures; histories of industrial photographers; image-driven art books with deindustrial subjects. The most obvious illustrations are “coffee table” publications about either industrial pasts or ruins. The genre of “past and present”-type books is long established, with large publishing houses often involved in the production of large-format books about industrial topics—here one could cite books such as Byron Olsen and Joseph Cabadas’ The American Auto Factory;Footnote 11 Cabadas’ River Rouge;Footnote 12 or Ford R. Bryan's Rouge: Pictured in its Prime.Footnote 13 A slightly different set of products are the local industrial heritage publications by publishers such as Tempus/Arcadia—an example of which would be Chrysler Heritage: A Photographic History.Footnote 14 These types of books make extensive use of the high quality corporate photography that documents the industrial heyday of the postwar period.
There are also a growing number of academic collections which make greater or lesser use of photographs to tell the story of industrial change. One could include here Thomas Dublin and Walter Light's The Face of Decline; Bill Bamberger and Cathy N. Davidson's Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory. Earlier still, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson's 1985 collaboration Journey to Nowhere offered an important mixture of imagery and text on deindustrial labor and landscape.Footnote 15 We could also look at a number of books which reproduce the corporate documentary photography of the interwar and, especially, postwar periods.Footnote 16
A second series of publications, and one that I think is the real target of the type of criticism discussed above are those which show industrial ruins. Here again it is worth noting the potential range we are discussing. We could, for example, see Bamberger and Davidson's book as an account of ruins as well as work. The pictures of abandonment are certainly beautiful and aesthetically rich. What often sets later books on deindustrialization apart is the absence of people in the chosen images. James Jeffery Higgins’ Images of the Rust Belt is a good example of this trend, with nearly fifty color plates completely devoid of people, even in cases where part of or the entire site being photographed was still active.Footnote 17 It is also important to note that this desire to capture abandoned industrial space is not unique to the US. In Britain, for example, we could point to Julian Germain's Steelworks, which takes for its subject the town of Consett in the North East of England; Ming Jue by Stuart Whipps, which shows the abandoned former Rover car plant in Birmingham (and its subsequent rebirth in China) and, finally, Billancourt by Francoise Bon and Antoine Stéphani, which includes images taken inside and outside a non-operational Renault plant near Paris just prior to its demolition.Footnote 18
In the US there are a growing number of urban-explorer-inspired coffee table books about, in part or exclusively, former industrial spaces and nowhere is more “explored” than Detroit. The “Motor City” may not produce the world's cars anymore, but it does provide the raw material for countless books on ruins. These include The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre; Lost Detroit: The Stories Behind the Motor City's Majestic Ruins by Dan Austin and Sean Doerr; and Detroit Disassembled by photographer Andrew Moore.Footnote 19 Trying to summarize these publications is quite difficult because they are so varied and are designed for different audiences. Some are academic, others are intended as local, regional or even industrial history, while others are clearly fine art books that happen to draw on industrial subjects. Related to the latter type of account are those by and for the urban explorer movement. The commentary in each of these sub-genres is also varied, with some giving a great deal of attention to the industries and people the ruins once housed—this can be even true of those books aimed at a fine art audience. Julian Germain's book, for example, uses not only his own images of Consett, England postclosure, but also a wide variety of professional and amateur photographs which tell a complex story about this former steel town in its heyday. Often these books will include forewords or more substantive pieces either simply reflecting on the photographs or providing a wider analysis of the context of closure. Germain's Steelworks, for example, includes a subtle and thoughtful reflection on the question of sentimentality and visual imagery in David Lee's introduction to the volume:
The happiest pictures are in black and white. Black-and-white pictures are an abstraction by means of which, more often than not, the past is de-loused, sanitized and – customarily – rendered nostalgic. It makes times-gone-by appear cosy and desirable, as if they were a lost paradise where everyone was pals and works outings marked the highpoint of each summer. And so these monochrome snapshots and Tommy Harris's documents accentuate the quality of community that existed in those years of full employment and job security—in those pre-“lifestyle” days. Of course, our warm response to these images today has a lot to do with why the pictures themselves were taken.”Footnote 20
Clearly there is quite a complex relationship being suggested here between image and text, one that seeks to question attachment to the past on a number of levels. Those collections that essentially revel in the aesthetics of abandonment are, to be fair, in the minority.
Before proceeding to a more critical reading of these publications, it is worth briefly dwelling on other potential vehicles for smokestack nostalgia. Sherry Linkon has written on the growing phenomenon of deindustrial literature, which uses, to a greater or lesser extent, post-industrial communities as its narrative backdrop.Footnote 21 In a slightly different register we could also cite the growing interest in industrial heritage sites, sometimes commodified through their incorporation into theme parks and heritage centers;Footnote 22 and, finally, the re-release of corporate films depicting manufacturing in its heyday.Footnote 23
Making Sense of Smokestack Nostalgia
What then does the publication of this material mean, and how should we think about it? What does its emergence over the last two or more decades tell us about our society and its relationship to industrial culture? Clearly the fact that so many publications of various kinds and for different markets have appeared during this period tells us something. We can infer that there is an audience for this type of publication, and that this audience is varied in nature—former workers and their families, those interested in community and industrial history, academics and art collectors. It is important that we develop a framework around two themes that emerge in much of the writing about deindustrialization—nostalgia and obituary.
In the wake of the discussion so far it is vital to be a little more critical of one of the fundamental concepts used in this paper, namely nostalgia. For most people, be they academics or non-academics, nostalgia is usually a pejorative term which describes an uncritical or over-sentimental view of the past. Nostalgia is a “nice type of sadness” the invocation of loss or of an imagined past. However, there is a longstanding critical literature on nostalgia which makes problematic many of the simple assumptions people hold about this emotion. The classic sociological analysis of nostalgia is Fred Davis' Yearning for Yesterday. Davis suggests a taxonomy for studying this elusive emotion, identifying three orders of nostalgia: first order or simple nostalgia (the past was better); second order or reflexive nostalgia (was the past really that way?); and third order or interpretive nostalgia (why am I feeling nostalgic? what might this mean?). The essential point to note in Davis' writing is that almost all nostalgic reflection questions memory in a critical way. We have, therefore, to be careful not to dismiss memory as “simply nostalgic”; rather, we have to be far more attentive in interpreting what that critical account of the past and present represents.Footnote 24
In recent years there has been a welcome expansion in our sociological understanding of nostalgia.Footnote 25 Each of these interventions builds on and develops Davis' insights about the complexity of remembrance of the past. Svetlana Boym, for example, makes the distinction between a reflective and a restorative nostalgia—one a critical but passive position, the other implying a greater sense of engagement with the meaning of the past.Footnote 26 In works by Alastair BonnettFootnote 27 and Tim Strangleman,Footnote 28 the radical or oppositional aspects of nostalgia—where knowledge of the past makes a dialectic intervention in debates about the present—are brought to the fore.Footnote 29 In terms of the focus of this piece, remembrance around industrial culture can be read as a far more active engagement with the past. In seeking out the past, there is the pleasure taken in “better days,” but a critical engagement with both the past and present is simultaneously provoked. As the passage from Germain's book quoted above suggests, the past is in a dialectic relationship with the present, for example, we are forced to consider why fond memories are evoked by old photographs and, therefore, this process provokes and elicits ideas about now and then.Footnote 30 Often the label “nostalgia” is a pejorative one suggestive of, at best, sentimental attachment and, at worse, falsification of history. Therefore, when we think about attachment to, or finding value in, an industrial past, we need to be far more critical and not simply dismiss those who evoke the past in positive terms.
Secondly, we could also see these publications as part of a mourning process, the lamentation for a previous culture or set of identities based around industrial work; they then become a post–industrial necrology. Closure literature could be read as obituary, as collective mourning for something of value. This is important as, in some cases, the removal and destruction of industrial sites can be rapid. In their essay, “The Visual and the Verbal,” David Byrne and Adrian Doyle note the fate of the coal industry in Durham in the North East of England and the lack of any physical remains:
The program of “elimination” of mining progressed very rapidly. In mining parts of South Tyneside, an area which until the 1970s had four large modern collieries and where coal mining had been the largest single source of employment for men, there is actually more visible evidence of the Roman occupation, which ended in the fourth century AD and has no historical connection to any contemporary experience, than of an industry which at its peak in the 1920s directly employed more than 12,000 men as miners.Footnote 31
Images and other ephemera may therefore be one of the few ways to connect to something so recently lost. In her fascinating sociological study of the obituary, Bridget Fowler has argued:
The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step towards posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.Footnote 32
Read in such a way, the larger genre of deindustrial literature can be seen as a form of memorialization, a collective recognition of value and, therefore, as something that might be welcomed. But Fowler is also right in that an obituary is always selective, both in terms of who it chooses to draw attention to and by including or excluding particular aspects of a life. Thus Fowler's analysis, derived from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in using the concepts of dominance and subordination supports High's point about the ways in which some urban explorers produce accounts of post-industrial communities which are devoid of a critical discussion of class relations and processes. The urban explorers’ focus on aesthetics and the beauty of ruins, while acting as a selective obituary, equally ignores the people who once populated them. Furthermore, as High notes, there seems to be a class disconnect between the urban explorers and photographers who emphasize pleasure, exploration, and discovery of the self, and those for whom the ruins were once workplaces. There is something unseemly or objectionable in middle-class urban explorers gaining pleasure from sites of working-class loss. Spelunking can be read as akin to dancing on a grave, an unthinking act in what could be seen as a deeply meaningful, almost sacred space. The anger High displays in Corporate Wastelands is a response to class insensitivity twice meted out by middle- and upper-class people on the working class—first in the process of closure, and second as post-industrial necrology. In both cases there is a violence being done, one class on another either by accident or design.
However, I think it would be wrong to read “ruin” literature in just this reductive manner; it can be thought of as mourning in a more extensive and expansive way, one that is more inclusive and has a more open class dynamic. One of the main targets of High's criticisms of the depoliticized nature of ruin literature is the British cultural geographer Tim Edensor.Footnote 33 High uses Edensor's work to develop a broader critique of the aestheticization of ruins and the erasure of the legacy of the working class from certain abandoned sites. There is then, according to High, a privileging of aesthetics which, in turn, is disembedded from lived reality. This passage illustrates his frustration with Edensor's project:
Like those of other explorer narratives, the politics of Edensor's Industrial Ruins are often ambiguous. In the introduction, for example, he lists twenty-seven towns and cities where he personally encountered industrial ruins. He then informs the reader that “this is the last time I shall refer to their location, for the argument of the book would be less pertinent if they were accompanied by this superfluous geographical information.” But to whom are they superfluous and why? Certainly not to the men and women who worked in these closed mills and factories.Footnote 34
High continues, “Edensor strips these former industrial sites of their history and their geography just as surely as the departing companies, entrepreneurs, and trophy hunters stripped the sites of their assets.”Footnote 35
While latterly Industrial Ruins may well emphasize the aesthetic quality of abandoned space it would be unfair to suggest that Edensor's book ignores political and industrial context. His introduction, for example, contains a discussion of power and the way it is imprinted on the urban environment, and there is also a broader examination of the macro politics of deindustrialization. Those of us who are labor historians may bristle at the decontextualization present in Edensor's work, but he is less concerned with the historical specificity of space, and more focused on understanding the spatial in abstract terms. I argue that Edensor's book is important for offering us some critical tools for thinking about industrial work and how it might be remembered, as well as about labor history more generally. For example, there are various instances where Edensor directly or indirectly points out the imprint of work and workers in the context of abandonment. In part this helps us understand the absent presence of workers, how they used their built environment and what it meant for them. As Edensor states:
… photographs are never merely visual but in fact conjure up synaesthetic and kinaesthetic effects, for the visual provokes other sensory responses. The textures and tactilities, smells, atmospheres and sounds of ruined spaces, together with the signs and objects they accommodate, can be empathetically conjured up by visual material in the absence of any realistic way of conveying these sensations, other than through words and images.Footnote 36
Importantly, then, what I am suggesting is that even if the accompanying text of ruin literature is not critical, it nonetheless has the potential to be so, to evoke a response in the reader or viewer—it can provoke critical reflection. Therefore, Edensor's lack of geographic specificity allows him to develop general and abstract understandings of industrial ruination. While legitimate critique can be aimed at such abstraction, a defense would be that his writing allows us to move our own thinking forward, applying his understandings to the places and people we study. It may be that the absence of contextual detail makes Edensor's work more theoretically applicable across a range of examples and instances. It is precisely that lack of attachment and rootedness in the specific that facilitates broader theoretical points of similarity and difference between instances that is valuable. Further, in the absence of people, this type of approach allows us to think about material culture and the meanings and significance that attaches to it.
This edges us toward an important point in considering deindustrialization and the responses to it—the question of tangibility and materiality and its role in the memorialization of crumbling cultures. A couple of examples will help to illustrate this point. In Kate Dudley's book End of the Line, she quotes Donna, a former assembly line worker, discussing her desire to obtain a memento of her former work life:
When they start tearing [the plant] down, I'm going to go get a brick. I would just keep it. My kids know mama spent fifteen years of her life [in the plant] working, and to tell my future grandkids about it. You know, tell them that it was a place where we worked and that when they tore the building down, Grandma went and got herself a brick. For all that I put in there, I figure at least I deserve a brick.Footnote 37
In virtually all the research projects I have been involved in, the workers I encountered have had mementos of working life, and this impulse to preserve physical reminders of their industrial past can also be seen in the phenomena of communities, such of those of the coalfields in the UK, wanting to mark the passing of an industry with the erecting of a former pit wheel or miner's lamp as post-industrial sculpture. Ian Roberts discussed this trend in the former mining communities of the North East of England:
For the memory of the industry and particularly the former workers, the ability of the symbols to appeal beyond the direct community itself is a very significant point in preserving the potential of memory.Footnote 38
High himself notes this ritual of laid-off workers picking up bricks or stones from the ruins of their former workplace.Footnote 39 It is also noted by Bamberger and Davidson, who in their epilogue to Closing, draw upon the reflections of former workers on plant closure and entitle the piece, “Does anybody in America make anything anymore?”Footnote 40 It is a questioning of the “new capitalism,” but it also says something profound about a set of values in relation to the past, and also to the present and future—namely, it is an attempt to come to terms with the intangibility of work now when compared to the past.Footnote 41 “Things,” therefore, material objects, mementos of a work life, are important links to memories. Far from being abstract and impersonal material culture, as Daniel MillerFootnote 42 has argued, things are actually symbolic of social relations and the strength of culture. Material culture and its artifacts act as physical points of reference for intangible aspects of culture. They symbolize, encapsulate and epitomize both the general and the particular in shared as well as in individual lives. Material culture, then, performs a dual function in the remembrance of an industrial past. It is a link with creative tangibility, the making of things, as well as a vehicle for a person or community's link to that past.
There is another way to think about the rendering of post-industrial space into “coffee table” fine art and that is to draw the parallel with the celebration of these same types of structures and the work that went on in them when they were new or in full production. Miles Orvell quotes Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas from 1871:
“America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all surrounding and cosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision towards the future, more than the past …” For Whitman, it was a matter of incorporating the world of science and technology into a larger aesthetic vision of democratic civilization …Footnote 43
This sense of modern industry's ability to provoke awe is also echoed in Karen Lucic's study of Charles Sheeler. In discussing the machine age, she notes:
The characteristics of the machine age consisted not only of the technologically sophisticated phenomena that emerged—such as sixty-story skyscrapers, modern factories, and mass-produced consumer products—but also a wide range of attitudes towards these things. It was a time when presidents, industrialists, artists and intellectuals extravagantly idealized the machine for its supposed potential to create a perfectly functioning, efficient, and just society. Calvin Coolidge uttered a statement that exemplifies this machine idolatry: “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.”Footnote 44
While discounting some of the more outlandish sentiments expressed here, it is worth noting the way the passage captures the sense of wonderment and possibility of the industrial age. It is natural that artists, photographers, poets and others would want to capture that expression of pride, achievement and wonder. In the process of deindustrialization, this same instinct is present in the capturing of industrial decline. It is present in the images taken by photographers and urban explorers, of course, but is also to be found in some of the short essays that accompany the stills, by writers invited to reflect on the ruins. Here Philip Levine, poet, former autoworker and native Detroiter, reacts to Andrew Moore's book Detroit Disassembled:
When I recall Chevy Gear and Axel or Detroit Transmission—the two GM plants I worked in—I don't see color; I see both interiors in the same black-and-white movie that captured the old house on Pingree. In Moore's industrial photographs there is both color and texture; the browns and pebbled grays of the brick walls, the subtle and lovely blues of painted and aged steel. And much to my surprise light—a soft golden light—breaking through the upper windows. (How can I have forgotten that light? And now it comes to me; I worked nights in both places. At the end of each shift I would see the windows slowly grey and know I'd made it. Golden light I never saw.) In one magnificent horizontal view of a huge abandoned space we see an intricate spider web of steel speeding towards the horizon where a rectangle of pure light waits at the farthest end of the factory. This sudden revelation of sublimity in a place I can only think of as a hellhole simply stops me. I know I never saw anything like this, probably because I wasn't seeing.Footnote 45
Images of ruins and abandoned plants or machinery stimulate and provoke. They mark, and at the same time celebrate, a way of life and the places where livelihoods were won. The relationship between material artifact, photography and memory is not a simple one and it deserves our attention.
Discussion
We began by examining the criticisms being made about a contemporary turn to what some call “smokestack nostalgia.” This turn itself is arguably ambiguous in terms of the focus of criticism. At times what is being rejected is an uncritical sentimentalization of the past, one where tensions of gender and race, if not always class, go unnoticed, one where the destructive impacts of industry on health and environment are obscured. In a second manifestation, what is objected to is the way the urban fabric of industrialization is shorn of its contextualizing meaning and becomes a playground for primarily middle-class urban explorers intent on stressing the aesthetic qualities of abandoned worksites, producing romantic post-industrial ruins that in turn are commodified into “arty” coffee table books of large format photography. While taking these criticisms seriously, it is important to open these trends up to further interrogation in order to produce a more productive and generous reading.
Starting with the charge of nostalgia, it is important to realize that this attachment to the past tells us two things. First, many commentators have argued that nostalgia almost always tells us more about the present than it does about the past. Secondly, nostalgia is hardly ever “simple” in form but is more often a vehicle for reflection or critique rather than uncritical celebration. Therefore, the manifestations of smokestack nostalgia are symbols of unease in contemporary culture, viewing a relatively stable past as offering some form of fixity. Taking the more critical photo/essay subgenre of books on deindustrialization—say, for example, Closing or even High and Lewis's Corporate Wasteland—we could say that they act as both obituary and more critical reflection. They stimulate, as they are designed to, critical discussion about the value of work now and in the past and the morality surrounding closure. But I think, by extension, some of the other photography-driven books which privilege the aesthetic over questions of social justice also have the potential to act in a dual way as both obituary and critique. Just because the authors of these publications are not critical in the ways some of us might want them to be (although often times they are), it does not mean that their ideas cannot be adopted for critical purposes. The visual plays a key role in the practice of remembrance—evoking, eliciting, recording and stimulating. As historian Raphael Samuel says:
The art of memory, as it was practiced in the ancient world, was a pictorial art, focusing not on words but on images. It treated sight as primary. It put the visual first. Outward signs were needed if memories were to be retained and retrieved: “Something is not secure enough by hearing, but it is made firm by seeing.”Footnote 46
While much of the material discussed here is visual, with that power to elicit memory, we should not ignore other forms of engaging with the industrial past and post-industrial present, most obviously a growing number of novels and short stories. There are important generational aspects to this memorialization; in the introduction to this special issue the editors make the point that:
For the children of deindustrialization as for their communities, the industrial past provides a significant cultural foundation, but their relationship with that past is conflicted and complicated. In much of the rust belt, a whole generation of working-class people has grown up hearing stories about the good old industrial days but not ever doing such work … they know neither the hardships nor the romance of industrial work, except as the subject of stories about the past.Footnote 47
In my own research I have collaborated with photographer Stuart Whipps on his book Ming Jue.Footnote 48 Whipps took pictures of the abandoned former Rover car plant in the English West Midlands and in the newly opened plant in China where virtually all the machinery and fittings from the UK factory were transported and resurrected. While Whipps’ Longbridge photography could be seen as reflecting the aesthetics of abandonment his decision to work with a sociologist (me), as well as the head of photographic collections at Birmingham Library and Archives Services (Peter James) takes his work in a different direction. I asked Stuart why he took the photographs of the abandoned factory and he was unsure, but said he was somehow drawn to it, having been brought up in the region. The point I want to make is that in our essays James and I were able both to contextualize Whipps’ images in terms of the contemporary nature of work and globalization. It also afforded me the opportunity to reflect more deeply on industrial change—what happens when work goes from one place to another. The visual allowed me to think about deindustrialization from a new perspective.Footnote 49 The point I want to make then, is that each subsequent generation makes its own art, or does its own critique in different ways. But that is not to say that these interventions cannot, in turn, be used in different ways later—to paraphrase Marx, “artists make their own art but not in circumstances of their own choosing.”
So the smokestack nostalgia of images of abandoned plants and mills take on a different resonance with different audiences. While High and Lewis, and Clemens, are right that highly aesthetic images of abandoned industry when stripped of its social and cultural context can degenerate into “ruin porn,” it is important that we pay attention to abandoned spaces. It is the argument of labor geographers that what is distinctive about their discipline is the way they appreciate that space is not simply a boundary or a box in which work is done, but rather that work makes space and space in turn makes work. We must therefore be alive to the ways in which geography, history, work, and workers interact to produce norms, values, cultures and social life. While we can try to do this in workplaces that remain active, doing so in the context of deindustrialization is more difficult. While oral historians such as Steven High, and myself for that matter, may try and combine in our research accounts of the past with images, we perhaps need to be more open to those whose focus is not our own.
In his book Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel makes an argument for an open history that has at its center “the idea of history as an organic form of knowledge, and one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-life experience but also memory and myth, fantasy and desire …”Footnote 50 Further, he argues that history should be seen as the work of many hands, and that we should be more relaxed about those involved in marking the past. This does not make critical academics redundant: our task in practicing working-class and labor history is to ensure that this critical voice is heard, that industrial obituary and memorialization is informed by a broad understanding of the people and communities, cultures, and values that created workspaces.
