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Paper short abstract

This paper combines flawed 35mm photographs of Berlin’s urban ruins with evocative moments of apparent fieldwork failures. Reworked as postcards, these materials counter heroic narratives of urban exploration while challenging academic obscurantism through emotions, creativity and speculation.

Paper long abstract

Urban exploration involves the trespassing of modern ruins, motivated by curiosity, and an interest in heritage, memory and preservation. Dominant textual accounts focus on transgression, adrenaline, and a sense of conquest, often articulating a form of heroism closely aligned with hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, the practice relies heavily on photography, producing carefully composed images that risk the aestheticization of decay. Over four months in 2014, I conducted an ethnography-led study with the author of Abandoned Berlin, one of the most meticulously curated urban exploration websites worldwide. Whilst disentangling social, temporal and material dimensions through an affective perspective, my field notes revealed repeated moments of vulnerability, fear, and disenchantment. At the same time, and since I employed a cheap, DIY 35mm camera to document fieldwork, my images emerged blurred, damaged, or superimposed (see: https://www.pabloarboleda.com/proyecto/abandonned-berlin/).

Drawing on the idea that “good pictures in anthropology will always be relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory” (Leon-Quijano 2022: 573), this presentation argues for a counterintuitive shift in which technically ‘bad’ pictures become conceptually productive as long as they appropriately mediate my urban exploration experience. Inspired by the postcard as a multimodal image/text device that embraces fragmentary micro-reflections and immediacy (Gugganig and Schor 2020), I paired flawed photographs with short vignettes narrating evocative moments of apparent fieldwork failures through situated, atmospheric prose. By linking (im)perfect images of (im)perfect buildings where I experienced (im)perfect moments, my work counters the dominant representation of urban exploration while advocating for an accessible academic writing enriched by emotions, creativity and speculation.