WORK SITES / WORK CITES  VOLUME I:  An Introduction

 Photographs taken at various post-industrial sites and warehouse districts on or near the Upper Mississippi River in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN 1982-2016 and their accompanying texts. 

It can be difficult to perceive that architecture is representation — representation that exists at the intersection of all kinds of contingencies. Alongside aesthetics, political, social and economic conditions make architecture both the producer and product of social space.  —Janet Cavallero ¹

If architecture is both the producer and the product of social space, then what does it mean to be situated in a place of desertion and ruin where vast amounts of human capital, acres of buildings and critical infrastructure have been abandoned, left to the elements to decay? What does it represent to the inhabitants, this dismantling of the economic and social spaces that defined their sense of self? How does one begin to recover from this loss while embedded in communal decline? If architecture is representation then how are these abandoned post-industrial sites perceived by outsiders? As an artist born into the working-class shaped by such landscapes, now moving about in different worlds, these questions form the basis for this body of work and the context presented here is both social and personal.

We are all products of place, especially those places we’ve called home. We’re secure in knowing who and where we are when we’re there. We do this via a neural activity that encodes our local knowledge of place through mental processes composed of a series of psychological transformations called cognitive mapping “by which an individual can acquire, code, store, recall and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment.” ² Our identity is also shaped by our employment and social group’s endeavors, successes or failures. Along with other professions, industrial work is “a cultural practice, involving social arrangements and systems of meaningful symbols, values and attitudes.” ³ 

When this sense of place and identity is disrupted by traumatic change, it can impose what’s considered a form of cultural-bound distress upon those whose lives and landscapes have been ruined by negligent deindustrialization and post-industrial abandonment. In 1982, I began to photograph these disappearing work sites as portraits of places that held meaning to me when I experienced a definite cognitive shift affecting my psyche and identity. Along with my everyday spatial, social, and cultural environments being disrupted, a distinct shift also occurred in my photography and writing. I reluctantly subordinated my work in abstraction and poetics to these landscapes while maintaining a personal point of view influenced by those poetics. 

Initially I didn’t intend to make such a radical change in the direction of my artwork, I wasn’t motivated by making a statement about what was happening around me. Indeed, I resisted this as most of my peers didn’t care to learn about the impact on my people, an inner city, working-class, working-poor community not on anyone’s radar. Emptying factories and warehouses benefited my fellow artists with cheap studio space in dead zones where they could be free to party and make art. So, I kept it to myself, remaining private about my background, quietly making this body of work in a state of mourning. Eventually, when deindustrialization became widespread throughout both cities, my work took on the dimensions of a cultural critique as I began to ask; if we are marked by place, then who am I, where am I, do I still belong here, what does it mean, and where would I go? I struggled with the irony and feelings of hypocrisy of having a studio in a warehouse where industrial tenants had left after laying off their workers, people I knew. I felt like a traitor to my kin and didn’t talk to them about my work as an artist, although I was encouraged by my father, an unemployed machinist who loved photography, gave me my first camera, set up a darkroom for me and would accompany me to shoot at certain sites. I was doing this work for him, too.

I felt isolated in the quietude I had maintained with this project until Bern and Hilla Becher won the Leone d’Oro award for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1991. I was moved by their devotion to photographing the incredible architecture and engineering of vanishing industrial structures and their typologies. And despite their photographs being considered conceptual sculpture, I do feel a kinship with them. I too worked in series and sequences in my artist books, compiling images into taxonomic sets and writing texts for each one. They gave me an art world permission structure to share and exhibit my work at last.

My aesthetic is a result of analog photography’s tools and materials, which contributes a temporal aspect inherent in these photographs as content in this project. At that time, my 35mm format camera and analog film processed by hand were what I could afford to use as an artist of nominal means. When I was present on these familiar sites, a lightweight camera and zoom lens allowed me to make this work. I could easily move about and concentrate on certain details and elements that revealed specifics of the site or held personal meaning; the “systems of meaningful symbols, values and attitudes” not always obvious to viewers. My writing contributes to their understanding but does not explicate, as poetics better serves this work. Nevertheless, as a woman often working alone it would not have been safe for me to set up the type of large format camera preferred for photographing architecture on these sites, even if I had one to use. 

In time, these private mementos of vanished industrial architecture, engineering and infrastructure revealed various typologies and visual narratives that became the basis for reflection and commentary through essays and poetry combined in my photo bookworks and works on paper. Volume I of Work Sites/Work Cites, contains the sets Afterlife, Urban Verticals, Warehouse Windows, & Warehouse Doors; accompanied by poetry derived from historic accounts and personal observations. Work Sites/Work Cites Volume II; Fire, Wrack & Ruin reveals the abandonment and resulting dereliction or demolition of numerous work sites that caused property decline, abjection, despair and eventual abandonment of housing in the adjacent neighborhoods. Not only was there a loss of good paying jobs, there was also a subsequent loss in property value and investment in houses owned by area residents which contributed to their inability to recover from this deindustrialization.

I also value these photographs as indexical markers of relics and fragments of these extinct social spaces. I am committed to the poetics of place rather than a documentary account, as much has already been written by journalists and scholars about deindustrialization and I leave that to them. My poetics and aesthetic have a place within this narrative and should co-exist alongside their writing. Regrettably, along with these scholarly and documentary examinations, an internet-driven, often exploitative practice of photographing industrial ruins in Rust Belt cities by voyeuristic outsiders, dubbed ruins porn, is often superimposed on a project I consider autobiographical. I’m now required to address this practice when presenting my work in order to dissociate from these hit-and run urban-explorer images. Anyone confusing my work with ruins porn is mistaken. As a working-class artist whose life has been repeatedly disrupted by irresponsible deindustrialization, globalization, neoliberal economic policies, cultural marginalization and predatory real estate practices, I offer a distinct point of view. My intent is to memorialize what’s been lost as an act of resistance to this erasure. However, these are not nostalgic accounts as most of these sites are disturbing, abject and even menacing. Instead, I provide the viewer the ability to visit and return to these difficult or disappeared places through book formats and prints that enables one to linger and contemplate what was found there.

Conceptually, this work is adjacent to the long-standing tradition of ruins in art, yet my ruins are anonymous waste-spaces unknown to all except local inhabitants, that have now disappeared. I recognized then that I was witnessing the collapse and erasure of a century-long industrial revolution celebrated in early photography as evidence of America’s dominance as an industrial super-power. In my time these industrial sites became anachronistic, leaving toxic brownfields and surrounding neighborhoods in decline. The remediation of these sites was necessary, yet it paved the way for profitable real estate development followed by gentrification designed to displace the underemployed with a more affluent class. Even if one remained in their neighborhood, it had become foreign terrain.

The lives and sites of the urban working-class and working-poor are rarely memorialized or commented on in our own words so I feel that I can only speak for myself and those close to me, yet I do know my work represents familiar situations and resonates for many. This is personal work—my class background shaped my entire life and its trajectory. In my formative years as an artist and writer I was held back by my class-status and post-industrial forces over which I couldn’t prevail, and as a result I unintentionally but devotedly made this project my life’s work. Unable to separate myself from those conditions and guided by the values I inherited, I began to assert that this material is fit for artistic inquiry and made a commitment to this project regardless of its reception.

My working-class upbringing also influenced my studio practice. My artist photo-bookworks are made using the industrial tools, equipment and hand-skills of the working-class. I became a papermaker, master letterpress printer and bookbinder in an era of deskilling in arts education influenced by institutionally-dominant conceptual practices dispensing with the art object, and of artists removed from personally making their art/objects by passing on the fabrication to anonymous, highly skilled artisans. Despite this acceptance of out-sourcing the production of one’s art, craft practice is central to my work as I think through making, with material culture contributing to the content of my books. My artist photo-bookworks are designed to be handled by the viewer who receives meaning through a durational, interactive, haptic experience while guided by language. Indeed, I view these photographs not solely as images and texts, but also as objects.

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard spoke of the immanent presence of the object in a photograph rather than its representation as a subject. Each of my photographs is an object/artifact withholding its irretrievable identity from the viewer, an unexplainable mystery. For over forty years it’s been my work to decipher and interpret them for myself and others. These image/objects permit me to revisit the extinct neighborhoods, sites and structures that remain mapped in my mind vivid and clear, and despite their actual inaccessibility, their immanent presence is the portal to enter and contemplate these ghost-sites. –PMR

1. New Art Examiner, 1997

2. Wikipedia; cognitive mapping entry, retrieved, August 2022

3. Reanimating Industrial Spaces: Conducting Memory Work in Post-Industrial Societies; by Hilary Orange, p. 13-27, Institute of Archaeology Publications, Routledge, London 2016