Daily photos no 15: Rural rust

I took these up by Coomasaharn Lake in Co. Kerry. Long a resort for tourists thanks to the Victorian railway network, Kerry has been seen as a romantic location: breathtaking mountains, sublime scenery, rural simplicity, a space away from the cares of cosmopolitan life. That's not changed - there's a floating population of Germans, British and various others on the West Coast (such as Donovan) who want to understand the place as standing in opposition to the values of industrial, globalised Western civilisation. A wetter Goa, perhaps.

This is, of course, nonsense. The landscape is as man-made and post-industrial as any other; the lives of those living there are as full of care and stress as any other place; romance and sublimity are privileged perspectives held by those who can turn up for a couple of weeks for leisure before returning to their normal lives.

Kerry is littered with abandoned cottages and smallholdings, as are many counties. The population of Ireland has still not recovered to pre-Famine levels, while the combination of hunger, imperialism, land ownership laws under the British, geology, capitalism and dreadful governments often meant that simply abandoning an unproductive farm and emigrating for a life of manual labour in England, the US or elsewhere was often the best option.

There's an ethical aspect to photography, and I do worry about the dissonance between the aesthetic attraction of decay and corruption and the stories they represent: ruin-porn, as it's known, could either be a voyeuristic replacement of the lives encapsulated with mere aesthetic effect, or a memorial to and recognition of those lives. I haven't quite settled on a view yet, but I do recommend Barthes's Camera Lucida and Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others.