American Ruins
A fine visual meditation on decayed grandeur is Arthur Drooker's gorgeous American Ruins (Merrell). Using infrared format on a specially adapted digital camera, Drooker spent two years recording selected historic ruins within the United States. The infrared look proves to be particularly well suited for emphasizing the cracks and imperfections in aging buildings, attracting the viewer's aesthetic sense even toward structures not traditionally considered "beautiful": the Bethlehem Steel Mill, for example, or the U.S. Penitentiary at Alcatraz.
As Christopher Woodward writes in his introductory essay, "to Arthur Drooker, ruin is not the end of the story of a building but, rather, an episode in the cycle of the life, death, and reincarnation of great buildings." Ruins are the result of an unwitting collaboration between the work of man and the work of nature, and Drooker has made his choices wisely, from ancient sites like Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon -- more than a thousand years old -- to crumbling neoclassical plantation houses like Windsor in Mississippi or Rosewell in Virginia, to the haunted-looking summer estate of a Hawaiian king.