In this forthcoming book, award-winning Swiss photographer Catherine Leutenegger captures the decline of Rochester, New York, home to the headquarters of Eastman Kodak—once the biggest photography brand in the world, now a dwindling memory. The photographs are billed as “attentive, deadpan studies” of the ghost town-like city and the mausoleum-like Kodak buildings.
They’re beautiful works and stylistically right up my alley, but there is a schadenfreude-like perversity in their aesthetic precision. They seem focused on an idea of post-industrial decline that’s attractive, maybe even irresistible to the digital classes. Who among us, including myself, can resist looking away from photos of a town ravaged by its failure to comply with the rules of the Internet age? It all seems too convenient and simplistic.
“Kodak City” will be published this September by Kehrer Verlag.
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