Dora Apel

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways? 

In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer. 

These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films. 

Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Reviews
"Writing against the genre of ruin porn, Dora Apel's wonderful Beautiful Terrible Ruins reveals the way decay is inbuilt into capitalism at its creation. An excellent and penetrating study."
—Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

"In her thoughtful and riveting take on the decline of Detroit, Dora Apel makes the case that 'ruin porn' images of urban decay say less about a specific city than about the grinding forces of globalism and political abandonment."
—Scott Martelle, author of Detroit: A Biography

"In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles Sheeler's photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Rivera's murals of work. Today, the hulking ruins of old industrial buildings and empty skyscrapers symbolize the city. In this provocative analysis, informed by urban geography, political economy, and art history, Dora Apel reflects on what images of ruined Detroit teach us about the city,  popular culture, and American capitalism."
—Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

"'The borders between art, media, advertising, and popular culture have become increasingly permeable,' Apel writes, 'as visual imagery easily ranges across these formats and as people produce their own imagery on websites and social media.' And the aestheticized ruination of Detroit  feeds into a more widespread (even global) 'anxiety of decline' expressed in post-apocalyptic videogame scenarios, survivalist television programs, zombie movies, and so on ... Much of the imagery analyzed in Beautiful Terrible Ruins seems to play right along with that social vision. The nicely composed photographs of crumbling buildings are usually empty of any human presence, while horror movies fill their urban landscapes with the hungry undead - the shape of dreaded things to come."
--Inside Higher Ed - Scott McLemee

"In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations and bureaucrats who have abandoned it. The result is a work that seems to invigorate a depressed debate and ask timely questions about social values in America and the world it influences."
--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Dora Apel's multi-layered, thought-provoking account of the decline of Detroit and our visual perception of that decline uses Detroit as a case study to explore the anxiety brought by the repeated and continual emphasis on ruin imagery. An eloquent examination of the aesthetics of decay, the charismatic appeal of both the beautiful and the repulsive, drives the book."
--ARLIS/NA Reviews

"Bringing her usual due diligence to bear, Apel digs deep, tracing the roots historically, culturally, and politically of the West's fascination with ruination and its import for today ... Essential reading."
--Infinite Mile

A provocative and challenging book … Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty."
--CHOICE

"What is refreshing about Apel's approach is that her analysis reaches far beyond the spectacle of abandonment and decay to address the forces behind urban decline. In the process, she delivers a powerful critique of the role of corporate disinvestment and neoliberal globalization in ruining cities."
--Journal of American Studies

"Apel again captivates with her incisive reading of cultural production."
--Journal of American History

"Apel mounts a scathing critique of the dominant narrative [of Detroit in Beautiful Terrible Ruins]."
--International Sociology Reviews

"Beautiful Terrible Ruins is a fascinating book. Apel makes a powerful statement about how we need to look more closely at our own material culture, especially as it is expressed in visual imagery and in the built environment itself in order to better interpret our history. As Apel aptly comments, 'to look at Detroit’s beautiful terrible ruins and talk about its decline is talk about everything that is wrong with global capitalism today.'”
--Middle West Review

Published by Rutgers University Press, June 2015

Analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals and examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. This book also explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.

Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, or revulsion? Beginning in the late nineteenth century, nearly five thousand blacks were put to death at the hands of lynch mobs throughout America. In many communities it was a public event, to be witnessed, recorded, and made available by means of photographs. In this book, the art historian Dora Apel and the American Studies scholar Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs as a way of analyzing photography's historical role in promoting and resisting racial violence. They further suggest how these photographs continue to affect the politics of spectatorship. In clear prose, and with carefully chosen images, the authors chart the history of lynching photographs—their meanings, uses, and controversial display—and offer terms in which to understand our responsibilities as viewers and citizens.

Co-authored with Shawn Michelle Smith
Defining Moments in American Photography series, vol. 2
edited by Anthony Lee
Published by University of California Press, 2008

Reviews
"A lucid, smart, engaging, and accessible introduction to the impact of lynching photography on the history of race and violence in America. "—Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in America, 1890-1940

"With admirable courage, Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs that are horrifying, shameful, and elusive; with admirable sensitivity they help us delve into the meaning and legacy of these difficult images. They show us how the images change when viewed from different perspectives, they reveal how the photographs have continued to affect popular culture and political debates, and they delineate how the pictures produce a dialectic of shame and atonement."—Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, author of Neo-Slave Narratives and Remembering Generations

Outside of the classroom and scholarly publications, lynching has long been a taboo subject. Nice people, it is felt, do not talk about it, and they certainly do not look at images representing the atrocity.

In Imagery of Lynching, Dora Apel contests this adopted stance of ignorance. Through a careful and compelling analysis of over one hundred representations of lynching, she shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for both constructing and challenging racial hierarchies. She examines how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera and how these images circulated on postcards, but also how they eventually were appropriated by antilynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She further investigates how photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," the role that gender played in these visual representations, and how interracial desire became part of the imagery.

Offering the fullest and most systematic discussion of the depiction of lynching in diverse visual forms, this book addresses questions about race, class, gender, and dissent in the shaping of American society. Although we may want to avert our gaze, Apel holds it with her sophisticated interpretations of traumatic images and the uses to which they have been put.

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2004

Analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future.

Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

Artists discussed: Shimon Attie, Frédéric Brenner, Vera Frenkel, James Friedman, Matthew Girson, Erich Hartmann, Mikael Levin, Pier Marton, Rachel Schreiber, Susan Silas, Marina Vainshtein, Jeffrey Wolin

Reviews
"Promises to extend the discussion of 'second-generation' art and literature about the Holocaust in important ways." -- James Young, author of The Texture of Memory

"Apel grounds her analyses of contemporary artworks in a wide-ranging examination of debates about the limits and possibilities of Holocaust representation. " Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2001

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

One of the most pressing challenges in the world today is access to clean water. This chapter explores the crises of contaminated water in Flint, water shutoffs in Detroit, and larger questions about the control of water by private corporations and the changing nature of urbanization. As neoliberal policies seek to privatize infrastructure and essential resources, the resulting crises illustrate the disastrous results of decisions driven by profit rather than the public good and demonstrate the need for a rethinking of the urban imaginary to produce a radically democratic, anticapitalist form of global urbanization.

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity.

War reenactors and “living history” groups (who perform for the public only while reenactors perform both publicly and privately) have grown from a small phenomenon to a startling array of contemporary groups and events. In the United States alone, war reenactments draw thousands of participants and spectators each year; in 1998 as many as 25,000 “troops” took part in a huge recreation of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Reenactment is not focused on the Civil War alone, however; it has grown to encompass nearly every war that has ever been prosecuted. Is the drive to reenact a passion to make history “visible” or a desire to personally participate in a grand imagined narrative? How does historical reenactment intersect with contemporary culture, politics, and society?

This essay highlights the character of radical art through three case studies: a work on paper by Martha Rosler, a new media sculpture by Krzysztof Wodiczko, and a guerrilla theatre performance by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It reflects on different ways of being political within the public sphere of visual culture, specifically in relation to the inequities of capitalist culture, abuses of human rights, and investments in antiwar activism in relation to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This conversation revolves around Dora Apel’s work in the field of art and memory. Memory, in its mediating force, is critical for our understanding of the present and the construction of a future, or, rather, as Dora Apel
posits it in her recent book Calling Memory Into Place: “Memory effects are not about the past. How do they shape the present and future? Can
the way we remember the past play an active role in fighting ongoing forms of oppression and persecution?” (2020). These questions are a
critical invitation to think about events, topics and processes that also mark Dora Apel’s work. In this conversation we discuss the issues of
memory and ruin, justice and oppression, as well as the environment in the context of thinking about art. Thus, we hope to bring forward not
only the mechanics of how memory in the arts operates in the present, what it foregrounds and obscures, but also its relation to the environment.

Essay on shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Open access until February 2015
Theory and Event 17:3 (2014)
Special Issue on “Ferguson and the Tragic Presence of the Past,” Project MUSE. 12 Nov. 2014. http://muse.jhu.edu/.
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.wayne.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v017/17.3S.apel.html