While photographs has been described as ruins in terms of signs of the past, this paper draws on Hartmut Böhme’s definition of the ruin as “the paused moment between a not already gone past and an already present future.” The paper suggests that within contemporary media culture the photograph as volatile, mobile “networked” image is part of a process that projects the past vestiges or memories into a yet-to-be-built future in which “the world is produced as a ruin.” (Böhme). A particular focus lies on the theoretical and artistic work of Victor Burgin, for it attributes to the ruin a crucial role in the definition of the contemporary environment of the mass media as a hybrid memory space in which fragments of the past, present and future collide. In the Internet, Burgin argues, photography and film do not appear as single objects but as part of what he calls the sequence-image, a complex, heterogeneous mixture of different kinds of moving and still images based upon memories and impressions of the real world. Neither photograph nor film, the sequence-image is a perceptual category situated somewhere between a building that was (the ruin) and a building that will be (a site under construction). This paper explores how in Burgin’s work since the 1990s the ruin is linked to photography in a complex, dialectical way, according to which the photograph, in its totality, is “the ruin of the world” as much as it signifies, as part of the sequence-image, “the ruined horizon of the future”.