‘Distinctly diabolical beauty’

Throughout the ages, humanity has attempted to shelter itself: from natural disaster, war, nuclear catastrophe. Photographer Richard Ross documents these efforts in “Waiting for the End of the World” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), his five-year, three-continent journey into the world of safekeeping. The photos will be at Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design from Sept. 11 through Oct. 30.

Ross, who has taught photography at UC Santa Barbara since 1977, is principal photographer for the J. Paul Getty Museum’s villa restoration project. His comments are excerpted from an interview in the book by author and commentator Sarah Vowell:

I FEEL GUILTY ABOUT THE EXISTING beauty in some of the images.... These places are chilling physically with a preponderant, eerie stillness. I think they have a distinctly diabolical beauty.

The Emigrant Mountains in my picture stand in stark contrast to what lies beneath. The air vents were shot specifically with the breathtaking landscape in the background to emphasize this. A casual passerby would never see these vents and could not suspect what they signal below. In effect, we are all casual viewers of the landscape. For reasons unknown I have taken on the odd responsibility of making what is hidden, visible -- by changing the status of these structures from covert to overt.

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THERE ARE INNUMERABLE THINGS TO fear about a nuclear exchange that are symbolized by the existence of shelters designed to protect a citizenry from an overwhelming, devastating attack. If you put the images of people’s fears into a visual representation, the clear winner is the mushroom cloud -- the poster child of the Cold War. The bomb shelter, specifically the blast shelter, has been something that has existed as a literary or intellectual idea but never as a visual image. My goal with this project was to reexamine these locations -- to visualize them and evoke their present status....Make them real and tangible.

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MANY OF THE SHELTERS ARE ALMOST womblike, structurally organic spaces with an entrance resembling a reversed birth canal: a mysterious, inviting, convoluted tunnel with a light at the end of it, promising security, protection, nutrition, and life-granting safety inside. Think of reemerging from this sanctuary and being reborn into a world that is fearful and drastically changed from what we had known before and from what we imagined could happen. Sex and death all tied together.

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I AM DRAWN TO SITES WHERE BENIGN neglect dominates. Many of the shelters I visited are abandoned or not used. The sparse light in these shelters is clean, symmetrical, undisturbed -- waiting for my camera.

Does this “safekeeping” architecture represent progress? It represents massive delusion. Efficiency? For whom? If an infinitesimally small portion of the species survives, is this efficient for the group as a whole? On some level, perhaps it is. I really don’t know how to define the human condition anymore.

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SHELTERS ARE THE ARCHITECTURE OF failure -- the failure of moderation, politics, communication, diplomacy and sustaining humanity. They represent the ultimate in optimism and belief in individual survival and paradoxically the ultimate in pessimism -- the expectation of the destruction of humanity. The architects of these structures envisioned an inevitable cataclysm. It doesn’t get worse than this. That said, everything about this project is counterintuitive. I am optimistic when I find shelters that are unused and abandoned. Conversely, I am depressed when I come across shelters that are gleaming and inviting, such as some of the Swiss shelters where classes in preparedness are taught.

In St. Petersburg, Russia, I photographed the Trendy Griboyedov Club. I found it wildly optimistic. People use these clubs -- converted underground shelters -- to drink, dance and mate. This is a celebration of life rather than an anticipation of death and destruction. The club rejects the intent and purpose of its origins. Finally it made sense.