Abandoned

A class series about discomfort. Things stripped and boarded but not yet demolished, shot at golden hour so you are pulled in before you see what you are looking at. The strongest body of work on this site. It is not about decay on its own. It is about decay next to the systems that keep people out. I was drawn to things in an in-between state. Buildings stripped and boarded but not yet demolished. Vehicles on the path to destruction. Machinery decaying at the edge of a job that may never finish. Those scenes raise the most questions, because you cannot tell whether you are looking at the end of something or the middle of it. I shot almost all of it at golden hour and dusk on purpose. Warm low-angle light makes chain-link, barbed wire, and plywood feel approachable, so you are pulled in by the light before you register what is being shown. In the gutted interior the scattered warmth reads as decorative until you realize the light is coming through holes in the architecture, and the thing it is lighting is the damage. Compositionally there is a barrier in front of almost everything. Fences, doorways, narrow corridors, signage. You are looking through or past something rather than at it. Your eye has to pass through the wire to reach the landscape, which is the physical experience of being kept at a distance. A man moves through several of the scenes so the viewer has somewhere to stand. People treat beauty and hostility as opposites. I do not think they are. What it taught me. The hardest part was cutting photographs I loved. Several of my favorite frames did not survive, because they did not carry the theme. A strong series is not a collection of good photographs. It is the relationships between them, and editing meant thinking less about which images I liked and more about which ones build a sequence: arrival, beauty, hostility, confrontation, emptiness, and whatever comes next.