I have recently seen a newspaper article which I will include in my research of 20 Amazing abandoned places. I felt so inspired by these images that I wanted to start a document of abandoned buildings,there history and future.Its important that the public know whats happening to abandoned buildings and to exploit that these are not being taken advantage of.
Furthermore ,I want to embrace the abandonment of the building and to shoot something significant which has been left to rot and the purpose for this is to make the viewers/public know about the wasted beauty within our back garden.
I feel really strong about this subject as historic buildings /places could be lost due to carelessness.I think it will be interesting as I don't know what buildings/places I will be photographing and you never know what you will come across.
Urbex Photography
Niki Feijens
Niki is an Urbex Photographer who has recently been published by the Daily Mail for his acknowledgement within the Urbexing industry.
http://www.nikifeijen.nl/
Bio
Urbex, short for Urban Exploring is according to Wikipedia: The examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities. So basically visiting and photographing abandoned buildings, tunnels, industry, castles etc.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316987/Photographer-Niki-Feijens-eerie-images-abandoned-farm-houses.html
I really like these images from Niki, I like the style and composition he uses when photographing abandoned buildings, I have looked on his site and he has some interesting images most of them a bit dark and in relation to abandonment . Niki's images contain HDR and this is done during editing, I would love do shoot an abandoned building with history to show that its beauty has been destroy as you can most of the time see when you visit places they where once magnificent buildings/places
28 days Later
After researching Niki i decided to join an Urbexing website to see if there where any great locations for my photo shoot the intention of this brief was to capture an iconic building and exploit it's dying beauty. I have had a browse and came across Hostpitals,factorys,cinemas,ships and world war 2 bunkers.
Report from Telf
The Cellars Clough woollen mill was owned by Samuel Firth of Gatehead in Marsden, and opened in 1888. He also owned Holme Mill. By the 1960s, it was owned and run by Fisher, Firth & Co. which became Cellars Clough Woollen Mills Ltd, managed by another Firth son, in 1981. The company has now been dissolved.
Situated just off the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, the mill’s pond is now a very popular fishing spot.
Cellars Clough Millls had been left derelict for a number of years now until a property developer purchased the Mills in view of converting the property into apartments. A scheme for 114 apartments was created, submitted and now accepted which included on site shopping and gym facilities.
There was also a culvert under the mill that looked really cool, but without wellies I didn't fancy an hours drive back home with wet feet.
Tony Worobiec
After looking at Tonys work i have realised the potential in the abandoned photography industry for creativity,most of Worobiecs images really challenge the element of isolation as he frames most of this shots with a large environment around them.I also admire the type of editing Tony does because he feels the natural to the enviroment .
Flickr
Abandoned Detroit
I found myself surfing through flickr admiring a number of images on the theme of abandonment and urban decay. Here are a few images I have selected .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/10421937/Photographing-the-worlds-most-fascinating-abandoned-buildings.html
http://digital-photography-school.com/25-evokative-images-of-abandonment-and-urban-decay
http://www.urbexphotography.co.uk/
http://www.silentuk.com/
http://www.nikifeijen.nl/application/nikifeijen/assets/chernobyl/
I was born in 1977 in Eindhoven, located in the south of The Netherlands. Altough it's not my profession i've been experimenting with photography ever since i was a kid. While shooting several years with a Nikon F65 analog camera i soon switched to the joy of digital photography. Started out with Sony and Panasonic I ended up with a Nikon D70 being my first digital SLR. A world opened up and after a D90 i’m settled with the fantastic full frame D800 now. an Awesome combo with the Nikon 14-24mm 2.8 lens.After a diversity of photography directions (Landscapes, Sports, Concerts) i discovered Urbex photography.
Most of my shots are HDR shots, short for High Dynamic Range. HDR is perfect for low light locations but it has to be subtle.
Besides Urbex i have this crazy stairs addiction. I can spend hours underneath a staircase just to take that one awesome shot. When shot right, a stairwell or an atmospheric urbex shot can turn into something very special, almost a piece of art.
That’s the exactly what i want to show people;
The beauty of decay, the Art of Urbex.
Some history:
http://www.arenaphotographers.com/viewMemberGallery.php?galleryID=69
Kevin Bauman
The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90's as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.
Brush Park, on the outskirts of Detroit's entertainment district was always an area of interest to me. For as long as I can remember the area, housing large houses and mansions, sat largely abandoned just a stones throw away from the Fox Theater, and not far from Wayne State University, the Masonic Theater, and even the central business district. How could an area that was obviously once a wealthy enclave in the city become an example of the downfall of American cities?
For years the area had signs advertising the redevelopment that was about to take place. It finally began to happen, with the construction of the new ballpark for the Tigers, and Ford Field for the Lions. New condos, and town homes began to appear amidst the rubble of burned out mansions turned apartments. Some of the houses were so large they became "loft condos". As the entertainment district flourished, and Brush Park began to transform into something new, I realized the other approximately 135 square miles of Detroit was largely ignored. The excitement about Detroit's "rebirth" took center stage, while much of the rest of the city was becoming largely abandoned. Even Brush Park itself was still largely abandoned, but with the remaining tenants of Brush Park buildings being pushed out, and many of the old houses torn down, I moved on to other areas, where Detroiters were attempting to make a life among abandoned and burned out houses. Often times, the neighborhoods were almost completely abandoned. In these neighborhoods I encountered concerned citizens, packs of wild dogs, 20 foot high piles of toilets, and houses with the facades torn off, filled with garbage.
As the number of images grew, and a documentary style emerged, I switched from mostly black and white, to color, and decided to name the series 100 Abandoned Houses. 100 seemed like a lot, although the number of abandoned houses in Detroit is more like 12,000. Encompassing an area of over 138 square miles, Detroit hasenough room to hold the land mass of San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan Island, yet the population has fallen from close to 2 million citizens, to most likely less than 800,000. With such a dramatic decline, the abandoned house problem is not likely to go away any time soon.
After looking at this I intend on doing a photo shoot inside a house to get all the personal feeling into the frame as I want to expose what has been left behind and try to gather some evidence of the history of the place .
http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/
At the end of the XIXth Century, mankind was about to fulfill an old dream. The idea of a fast and autonomous means of displacement was slowly becoming a reality for engineers all over the world. Thanks to its ideal location on the Great Lakes Basin, the city of Detroit was about to generate its own industrial revolution. Visionary engineers and entrepreneurs flocked to its borders.
In 1913, up-and-coming car manufacturer Henry Ford perfected the first large-scale assembly line. Within few years, Detroit was about to become the world capital of automobile and the cradle of modern mass-production. For the first time of history, affluence was within the reach of the mass of people. Monumental skyscapers and fancy neighborhoods put the city’s wealth on display. Detroit became the dazzling beacon of the American Dream. Thousands of migrants came to find a job. By the 50's, its population rose to almost 2 million people. Detroit became the 4th largest city in the United States.
The automobile moved people faster and farther. Roads, freeways and parking lots forever reshaped the landscape. At the beginning of the 50's, plants were relocated in Detroit's periphery. The white middle-class began to leave the inner city and settled in new mass-produced suburban towns. Highways frayed the urban fabric. Deindustrialization and segregation increased. In 1967, social tensions exploded into one of the most violent urban riots in American history. The population exodus accelerated and whole neighbourhoods began to vanish. Outdated downtown buildings emptied. Within fifty years Detroit lost more than half of its population.
Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.
This work is thus the result of a five-year collaboration started in 2005.
http://www.thephotomat.ca/#home/
For as long as he can remember, Sylvain Margaine has been fascinated by abandoned buildings. As a child, growing up in the French Pyrenees, he would be taken on tours of defunct textile factories by a father acutely aware of the region’s disappearing heritage. Then, in his teens, he moved on to churches, theatres, hospitals and castles, enamoured by their ephemeral beauty and eerie atmosphere, not to mention the “out of bounds” signs that – far from deterring him – served as a red rag to a bull.
By 1998, Margaine had started displaying photographs of his trips on awebsite and, now, he is publishing his second book on the subject. The pages of Forbidden Places Volume 2 are full of the crumbling remains of once-grand projects that either ran out of money, fell out of fashion or skewered themselves by their own pretensions.
Chief among them is the Bulgarian CommTheunist Party Headquarters, on a rocky peak in the Stara Planina, a range of mountains in the Balkans. Built over seven years, between 1974 and 1981, with the help of more than 6,000 workers, and featuring numerous frescoes and patriotic engravings, the building was open for scarcely longer than it took to erect, closing in 1989 after the fall of the Soviet Union. It now stands derelict and ravaged by the elements – a fitting tribute to a failed ideology.
Other buildings hide shameful secrets. The sanatorium in Tarragona, north-east Spain, began life as a hospital for tuberculosis patients but, from the end of the Spanish Civil War until 1976, it was home to several generations of orphans from the Franco regime who were badly mistreated.
“The atmosphere can be very powerful in somewhere like an old hospital or jail,” says Margaine. “You can really feel the bad things that happened there. I don’t believe in ghosts but sometimes at night, your imagination can play tricks on you.” In fact, Margaine receives a lot of emails from paranormal investigators, or people who say they’ve seen a ghost in his pictures.
“In one photo from an asylum, they think they see a blurry image of a man working at the far end of a corridor,” he says. “But it’s not a ghost; it’s the shadow of one of my friends. I have been doing this a long time and haven’t so far seen anything I couldn’t explain.”
Margaine is not a professional photographer, but travels a lot for his job – he is an engineer for the Brussels Metro – and typically adds a couple of days onto each trip to pursue his hobby. In fact it is more than just a hobby: researching and surveying “forbidden places” is a well-established subculture called urban exploration (also known as urbex, infiltration or “reality hacking”) with its own code of ethics – explorers must never break anything to enter a site, or vandalise or destroy the building in any way.
The Bulgarian Communist Party HQ, Buzludzha, Bulgaria
And, like all urban explorers, Margaine has his war stories. Over the years the 35-year-old has taken on wild dogs, hobos and drug addicts in pursuit of his photographs. He has also outwitted many a security guard.
“At Battersea Power Station, I was told I was not allowed to visit, so I went unofficially late at night,” he says, an unmistakable note of pride entering his voice. “There are guards there 24 hours a day, but I managed to sneak past,its just requires a bit of creativity and good timing.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19049254
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9940725/The-end-of-an-era-photographer-documents-last-days-of-BBC-Television-Centre.html?frame=2513942&page=1
http://zfein.com/photography/detroit/
http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/
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