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ATLANTA - (February 7, 2002) -- Photos often help jump-start conversations, but a new artist-in-residence at the Georgia Institute of Technology hopes her photography will aid discussion on sprawl and the evolution of urban landscapes.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ruth Dusseault joined the faculty in Georgia Tech's College of Architecture this past fall, where she holds a joint appointment between the Architecture and Industrial Design programs. She teaches an introduction to photography course and continues to work on a photo timeline of the massive Atlantic Station redevelopment project in Atlanta. "I love teaching photography," Dusseault said. "I think there are a lot of artists at Tech, and the College of Architecture seems to be the net that catches a lot of them. For architecture students, I think an understanding of photography makes them more visually literate and helps them to present their ideas." Dusseault is the College of Architecture's second artist-in-residence, part of a program begun at Georgia Tech four years ago with the intent to bolster the arts on campus and strengthening ties across academic programs. The first participant was Clark Ashton, an Atlanta sculptor who came to the Institute in 1997. He maintained a joint appointment in the College of Architecture and the School of Mechanical Engineering. "We believe this post injects new energy and ideas into our curriculum," College of Architecture Dean Thomas Galloway said. "Having an artist-in-residence goes beyond teaching a class or producing artwork for the campus. The mere fact that a photographer of Ruth's caliber is working on campus on a daily basis raises awareness for visual arts and provides greater interaction opportunities for our students, faculty and staff."
Associate Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of Georgia Tech's Architecture Program, said her students benefit tremendously from studying photography. "It is an excellent way of learning how to be more observant of the world around us, to really see things clearly and appreciate how the framing of visual imagery adds meaning to that world," Dunham-Jones said. "Ruth's work tends towards photographing architectural subjects and urban scenes. At the same time, she's extremely knowledgeable about the wide range of critical and fine art approaches to contemporary photography. I think she's particularly well suited to helping our students appreciate how to engage their work in everything from identity politics to the traditions of street photography." Although Dusseault began documenting redevelopment at Atlanta's former Atlantic Steel mill in 1999, the College of Architecture recently commissioned her to continue her work at the site. She intends to document the construction of Atlantic Station, a 138-acre, $2 billion mixed-use development that will feature residential, office and retail space. The site's first phase of development is slated for completion in October 2003. "She's working on a three-tiered project that intersects art and urban design," Dr. Galloway said. "It began with research on the Atlantic Station redevelopment project and will broaden into a multi-artist exhibition and public forum here at the college." Dusseault has earned multiple grants for her work and has lectured several times on the subjects of photography and urban form. Her early work at the Atlantic Steel mill site includes photographs taken before and during its demolition, environmental remediation and infrastructure construction. Atlantic Steel manufactured steel products at a 120-acre mill site here between 1901 and 1999. The closed site now is the location of the largest urban redevelopment in the United States, a brownfield project that will result in Atlantic Station. Dusseault's photo project at the site addresses a variety of topics sensitive to Atlantans, including historic preservation, social gentrification, the suburbanization of the urban core, the ecological memory of land, environmentally friendly living and the definition of place. As part of her work
at Georgia Tech, Dusseault will collaborate with Professor Chris Jarrett
in the College of Architecture on a photographic exhibition and essay,
Terrain Vague: Photography, Architecture and the Dusseault and Jarrett also will organize a related symposium to be held at the College of Architecture. During the symposium, some of the exhibiting artists will present their work and ideas along with noted urban theorists. "I'm fascinated by the range of issues that this project touches on, from the specifics of brownfield reclamation and strategies of cleaning up contaminated sites, to broader questions of how places establish or retain cultural memory," Dunham-Jones said. "I love how Ruth's eye both for detail and the big horizon of this transformed landscape convey the vastness of the changes going on and invite us to speculate about how we're building our world." Dusseault said she has photographed Atlanta's urban landscape for about 10 years. "The Atlantic Steel project is a new kind of thing for me," she said. "In the end, the historic site and the neotraditional town will appear as bookends to a long period of macro-engineering." Until recently, Dusseault's photography has been more conceptual, she said. For example, for the past six years she's been interested in the communities beyond Atlanta's I-285 perimeter. "I was interested in the perimeter as a place," Dusseault said. She photographed various aspects of the area, including shopping malls, restaurants, landscapes and other elements of urban design. "I was interested in 'non-places' that resulted from the large-scale environments out there. I was just kind of fascinated in this type of space and how it evolved," she said. "Things like benign corporate gardens and parking islands - spaces that we pass by and do not notice on our way to our destinations. "I wasn't interested in the social aspects of suburbia. Others had tackled that in the 1970s. It was basically the structures, the spacing of the buildings, that interested me," she said.
After time, Dusseault began to focus on malls and shopping centers in her photography. She began to notice that most of them had the same kind of peculiar, hidden corridors, based on a standard design, that are used for deliveries and removing rubbish. She did a photo series of delivery doors, each plainly labeled with the name of the store. "These store signs to me became kind of found poetry," she said. "The words started to speak of the space I was in. I had found a non-place." She also became interested in fast-food dining rooms, especially late in the day when they were almost vacant. She photographed the dining rooms in a way that revealed the modernist ideas behind their design. An exhibit on this work is set to appear May 25-July 7, 2002 at The Light Factory in Charlotte, N.C. "When I began photographing the fast-food dining rooms, I wanted to reduce it to form," Dusseault said. "I was interested in the point where the multinational corporation meets the individual in the intimate act of dining." This work outside the perimeter sparked in Dusseault a sense that she was looking at aspects of the utopian community -- a very controlled sense of space and place. This led her to study utopian architecture and how those ideas and designs now shape communities. "I was searching for the origin of how the perimeter happened," Dusseault said. She began to examine the concepts behind New Urbanism and, about the same time, plans for the Atlantic Station project were announced. She then went to see the former mill site. "Nobody had ever photographically documented this site," she said. "It was too dangerous for visitors, so it became sort of invisible to most people. It was a non-place in the middle of the city." Dusseault began taking photos of the site, authenticating it before it began to disappear. She earned several grants and commissions for her work and, when they ran out, she continued to take photos of the site. "I felt somebody had to do it," she said. "I'm interested in how places form personal identity, that's an interest I have in common with the architects. I think the arts can help to decode the built environment through poetic acts."
Visiting Assistant
Professor Ruth Dusseault Associate Professor
Ellen Dunham-Jones Dean Thomas
Galloway
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