[4A] Ruins / General Analysis
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"After The Fire" and "View of Ruins" do not, unlike many of the other photos, evoke a direct emotional response - they lack the human element, the visceral shock and horror of the photos of the bodies. However, they are still far from neutral: they show workshops gutted by fire, their contents reduced to debris and rubble; the light from the windows, from which the glass has been blown out, harshly illuminate the workshop interior in stark blacks and gritty grays. The angle and framing are naturalistic, the camera held at around eye-height in "View of Ruins" and slightly above in "After The Fire", as though the viewer too is present in the room. The lone figure of a city offical standing at the window in "View of Ruins" emphasies the scale of the room and the extent of the destruction.
The photos challenge us with the knowledge that living women and men were present in the room at the time of the fire that reduced the machines they worked at to these shapeless piles of rubble. For contemporary viewers, these photos may have added resonance due to the glut of social documentary photographs of sweatshops and factories in the early 1900s. The connection between the photos of shops crowded with workers at their machines and these scenes of rubble and shrapnel would have been obvious.
Note that the walls, floors, and ceilings of the building are intact, despite the utter destruction of the interiors. The Triangle building had been declared "fireproof" - obviously the term only applied to the structures of the building, rather than its living and non-living contents.
The third photo, "Twisted Fire Escape", drives the point home - that there was no escape from the destructive force of the fire. Only one exterior fire escape existed. Not only was that number inadequate for the hundreds of workers in the building, the sole fire escape was not even fully functional - it bent and broke under the weight of the workers, panicked by the smoke and flames. Without any means of escape, the workers burned, suffocated, or leapt.