Abandoned places-a favourite subject of photographers. You can find dozens of websites devoted solely to finding interesting, desolate places to explore, some in surprising locations. Even in a large, populated city like LA, you can find plenty of structures with their days of practical use well behind them.
There’s some unease behind them though, as well, and it’s understandable. Finding an abandoned structure, even in just a superficial sense, is the architectural equivalent of finding a dead body. 
I’d argue that it’s more than just superficial- they’re actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, the difference being scale. A body leaves behind it a person’s life story, experiences, relationships. An old building has this, but for potentially hundreds of people. If it’s an abandoned house, you’re left wondering about the families that have lived in it over the years, the warm memories, the fights, whether or not someone at some point left the home and sold it to some other family. An abandoned gas station holds memories of employees- you wonder if they’re still around, what they thought about their work, the thousands of customers who stopped there, maybe only once, where they were coming from and where they went, and where they might be now.
These abandoned places are almost like society’s gravestones, marking memories of past relationships and interconnectedness between all of us. It’s no wonder photographers are fascinated by them.
Onto a completely practical note now- I’ve set up a flickr account, which you can view here: http://flickr.com/photos/lexybeast
What am I going to put there? Anything that I feel, for whatever reason, doesn’t really fit here. Hopefully you’ll enjoy. I set it up because I also particularly like the community that flickr not only provides but strongly pushes for, so don’t hesitate to add me on there if you’d like.
Oh, and all these shots were good old fashioned film, by the way. Ilford SFX, to be exact. I’ll be posting a lot more film work in the coming days.
5 Comments
This is one of your best posts yet. POETIC- Visually and literally.
Oh man, spot on regarding the fascination with old buildings. They were my source for fun and my blueprints for mayhem when I was a kid with nothing to do, forced to loiter wherever my dad deposited me (usually boring business buildings). There were plenty of abandoned mini-malls and plazas in Korea available for me to wander around in; felt like old times. I just found out about this website today (haven’t checked xanga in a while), will explore!
Fun, exciting, and yet sobering and inducing wonder. And film, very fitting. I gotta finish a roll…
=Matt=
Your photos are as usual beautiful…your technique gets better all the time!
Hey, I have a challenge for you.
I’d love to see photographs of ordinary houses that are lived in. I suppose it’d be hard to get away with it without being accused of being a stalker, but abandoned houses do have such a delicious and somewhat creepy and melancholy mythos about them due to their very nature…but I’d think the real challenge would be to photograph something completely mundane like your everyday matchbox house and to give it the same feel.
-Thank you Risey!
-John: Hey, speaking of Korea, are you still there? I’ll be in Seoul for a few days in July if you want to out.
-Matt: The SFX plus the red filter worked out nicely. You kind of get a good preview of what the image will look like to, since the red filter basically monochromes what you see… plus red.
-Bbbora: hm, I actually like that idea a lot. It seems like in Irvine I could get a creepy soulless vibe from a lot of the houses around here. I’ll work on it.