Light and the Aesthetics of Abandonment: HDR Imaging and the Illumination of Ruins

Abstract

The online circulation of photographs of abandoned places has been considerably influential on the contemporary visual culture of ruins. At the hands of online content-editors and users, images of ruins have become the subject of listicles, click-bait posts, image aggregators, and image hosting sites (sites such as, Buzzfeed, Imgur, and Distractify). Considering the high volume and frequency in the circulation of images of ruins as components of visual lists of the top abandoned places, this paper contemplates the relationship between the ruinous and the abandoned. When Svetlana Boym asserts, “ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality” (Boym 58), we must consider that this shock is most commonly conveyed through images. In the case of contemporary images, this sense of “shock” is often visually achieved through distorting the tonal range of photographs of decay and abandonment. Images that are tone mapped to display a high dynamic range of luminosity (commonly, “HDR photographs”) appear surreal – a disturbed reality distinct from that which we encounter day-to-day. The paper considers how light, in the manipulated tonal range of the photograph, problematises the ruin’s signification of meaning.