In the name of progress

Atlantic Steel Project chronicles a city in flux



For the past four years, Atlanta’s rapidly changing skyline has been photographer Ruth Dusseault’s muse.

She began photographing the Atlantic Steel Foundry in 1991 when it was still a fixture on the Atlanta landscape. But in 1999, she began documenting the transformation of that 100-year-old icon of America’s debt to fire and steel into the 138-acre Atlantic Station complex — the largest mixed-use, new urbanism development of its kind in the U.S.

Atlantic Station is more than a simple development project; it signals a symbolic shift for Atlantans in how we define “progress.” No longer content to simply build, we now build self-consciously with a philosophy and agenda, hoping to correct notions of suburban sprawl, loss of an urban center, loss of community and other maladies via architecture.

The continuing enigma of Dusseault’s Atlantic Steel Project has been whether her work is a straightforward documentation of this historical shift or some critical burrowing beneath the skin of the post-industrial, postmodern machine.

There is one image of the old foundry in Dusseault’s solo show at Swan Coach House Gallery, but the majority of work documents the construction of Atlantic Station in exacting detail. There is a tantalizingly ambiguous relationship between the past and the present in her work. With their wooden scaffolds and empty concrete ponds, the construction sites she captures often look more like ruins and decayed archeological sites than anything. The photographs are like prophesies of eventual obsolescence, suggesting that the mega-development may someday be just another age’s outmoded notion of progress.

Dusseault’s photographic deconstruction of the Atlantic Steel Station Project often seems indebted to the objective, documentary work of German conceptual photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher. But the work in this show, which coincides with Dusseault’s Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist award, is more carefully considered, stretching beyond the parameters of showing a city constantly in flux, a city under construction both literally and psychologically.

The work is also a continuation of Dusseault’s personal investigation of seemingly “meaningless” and unplanned space, like shopping mall delivery doors and fast-food restaurant interiors, which, the artist suggests, have more meaning and impact on our lives than state Capitols, national monuments and other buildings meant to glorify human achievement.

“Men Digging II,” for example, has an almost mythic quality. The photograph shows three men digging in a cordoned-off section of a vast dirt pit. That a project as enormous as Atlantic Station would use such a no-tech form of human labor is only one of the bewitching aspects of the image. Their act, which seems as desperate and as doomed as someone trying to bail out a sinking lifeboat with spoons, testifies to the ultimate futility of life itself.

But for the most part, it is buildings — not people — who have all of the autonomy. Atlantic Steel reinforces feelings of being inconsequential next to the awesome, overwhelming force of “progress.” In the Kubrickesque image “Elevator Shaft,” a cement monolith rises from the earth like that 2001: A Space Odyssey obelisk. The concrete wall seems to pulsate with a sense of dominion. Dusseault captures the awesome spectacle of massive building projects, which often lulls us into a false sense that the progress signaled in construction is actual social progress.

Dusseault records a common human experience that extends beyond issues of architecture, of feeling dwarfed and lost in the things we have created.

felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com