Since I was a young boy, I’ve harboured an interest in the abandoned. The rotten and the rusted pique a unique facet in my curiosity. At first, I was captivated by Pripyat, the city in the shadow of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The way that an entire city can just be left to ruin was (and is) fascinating to me. It seems impossible that tens of thousands of people can stage a mass exodus and just forget their lives behind.
I especially like the decay of man-made things. From rusted fences, to abandoned factories, I like it all. To think that someone’s careful, trained hands built the now-rotting husks of houses and the rusting bicycles. These things were built with meticulous instruction, yet here they now sit covered in vines and home to fauna.
The foreboding silence that comes with an abandoned building is so beautifully sobering. Many have walked the floors I photograph, many have spent their lives working or living in these spaces. Some called them home. Or their son's or daughter's homes. Some called them a workplace. What happened to them? What happened to these locations? Why are they left in complete disrepair? To me, they're like a crypt. A tomb of past lives and forgotten stories.
Below are my best attempts to capture these places. No photo will do the atmosphere justice, nor will any good photographer claim he can capture the sad silence in a frame.
