This complex, built in the end of the 19th century, was on my wish list for a very long time. When the opportunity arose to visit it, I grabbed my chance and carefully planned the exploration.
Here’s a fascinating piece of journalism published today by the New York Times.
After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was devastated by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the nuclear disaster caused a major evacuation and the creation of an exclusion zone around the old plant. Five years later, a photographer has ventured into the zone to deliver photos to the outside world.
Exploring the former house-monument of the Bulgarian Communist Party is one of the most exciting explorations I have ever done.
Who wouldn’t want to explore one of the world’s most haunted places given the chance? Okay, on second thought, maybe most people... Well, while on holiday with my family in Venice, I was recently given that chance and I wasn’t going to turn it down.
Once this was the most glorious building of Romania but since 1990 it’s been abandoned and slowly but surely falling apart. The building is now listed as a historic monument by the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs of Romania.
Exploring and photographing abandoned houses always comes with its share of surprises. It also often confronts you with some moral questions and scenarios -- there are many “what if’s” that can be associated with this hobby.
In 1976, Walt Disney World opened River Country, its first water park. In 2001, the park closed its doors. Since then, it has been left to deteriorate, and nature has begun to take the park back.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina ravaging the city of New Orleans. Photographer Seph Lawless was recently commissioned by The Guardian to use his camera to explore and document the aftermath of the storm as it appears a decade after its landfall.
For the past few years, photographer Will Ellis has been locating, exploring, and documenting obscure abandoned places in New York City. His images show everything from the ruins of old hospitals to abandoned subway terminals -- and sometimes the photos are one last glimpse of those spaces before they're reclaimed or reduced to rubble by developers or the government.
The North Wilkesboro Speedway in North Carolina was home to top NASCAR races from when it opened in 1949 through when it closed in 1996. It reopened briefly in 2010 but was shuttered again in 2011. Since then, it has been lying dormant as investors and businesses sort out the fate of the historic racetrack.
Photographer Seph Lawless recently paid the track a visit, capturing what the location currently looks like years after it was bustling with racing fans and speeding cars.
What leads a family’s decision as they decide to stand up, open their door and walk out, leaving everything behind? Forgotten homes sit scattered across our country like eerie time capsules filled with stories, rotting away under the unforgiving power of nature.
Last year, photographer Seph Lawless published a project called "Black Friday" showing abandoned malls across the US -- widely-published photos that documented the victims of the recession and the online shopping revolution.
Lawless recently revisited one of the malls and found that it had become filled with snow. The broken roofs and skylights had turned the indoor mall into a winter wonderland.
Christian Richter is a fine art architecture photographer based in the small town of Jeßnitz, Germany. A fan of exploring old, abandoned buildings, Richter has often come across tall spiral staircases that look both beautiful and disorienting when viewed from the very top looking down. These staircases form a photo series of his that is aptly titled, "Abandoned Staircases."
Rebecca Litchfield is a photographer who has faced radiation exposure risks, arrest and interrogations, and even accusations of espionage... all for the sake of her project "Soviet Ghosts."
You see, Litchfield is an avid urban explorer who has been fascinated by scenes of decay found in countries that were formerly part of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.
Photographer Pierre Folk has spent 3 years documenting the same, 20-mile long stretch of Parisian railway with his 4x5 view camera... but he's not doing it because of the trains. No, in fact, no trains have run on this railway in for 80 years.
The photos are Folk's way of examining the complex relationship between society and environment.
North Carolina-based photographer Tammy Cantrell has been shooting abandoned mills in the Gaston County area for years, but her Not an Exit exhibit/series reveals a part of those mills that no Urbex photo on its own ever will.
By combining her images with Lewis Hine's documentary photographs of child labor, she allows the past to peek out through her photographs and whisper of a harsher time in our history.
It took a week of sleepless nights and a whole lot of Red Bull and 5-Hour Energy shots, but the duo of photographers behind Tree Speed Photo managed to get through it in order to capture this, dare we say 'epic,' motion time-lapse in Death Valley.
One of the draws of Urban Exploration photography, or Urbex, is the chance that you'll discover and photograph something truly strange and unique. A building abandoned for so long that nobody realizes the treasures hidden within. Or, in this case, a 'train graveyard' with over 70 dilapidated subways, trains and busses in the middle of a North Carolina forest.
The world of Urbex (short for "Urban Exploration") photography is a secretive one. In general, Urbex photographers keep purposely silent on the specific locations where they've shot, and for the most part, it's not because they want to keep these dilapidated finds entirely to themselves.
The reason why asking an Urbex photographer where a photo was taken is likely to be met with a vague answer or none at all is perfectly illustrated by the story of the Belgian snow cats in the photo above.
Do you enjoy adventure? I mean, REALLY enjoy adventure, not just taking a walk through your local woods. Well, if you do, you'll enjoy this. Put together by photographer Mike Palmer and cinematographer Jon Simonassi, this video shows their journey to photograph an abandoned prison in Ontario, Canada.
Dallas-based photographer Noel Kerns specializes in capturing haunting night scenes of ghost towns, decommissioned military bases, and industrial abandonments. His creative use of different colored lights combined with moon light helps these old abandoned places come alive as vivid nightscapes.
In September 2010, visual artist and filmmaker Rä di Martino set out on a quest to photograph and document old abandoned film sets in the North African deserts. The project had started when she discovered that it was common practice to abandon these sets without tearing them down, leaving them fully intact and crumbling over time, like archeological ruins.
Martino spent that month traveling around Chott el Djerid in Tunisia, finding and photographing three Star Wars sets in all for her photo series No More Stars and Every World's a Stage.
To "raise awareness of the social and economic challenges the city of Detroit," website Detroiturbex explores and photographs abandoned buildings and places in and around the city. One of its recent projects focuses on Lewis Cass Technical High School, which had its building devastated by a major fire in 2007 (the building was subsequently demolished).
Yesterday we featured an interesting example of digital photographs being reintroduced into the real world in another form (Google Street View photos as life-sized portraits), and now here's another one. For her project "Broken Houses", NYC-based photographer Ofra Lapid created realistic models of abandoned buildings using printed photos, and then photographed them on an infinite gray background.
The Camera is a beautiful 7-minute-long short film by amateur filmmaker Peter Lewis …
Washington Times video producer Drew Geraci created this amazing time-lapse video of an asylum that was abandoned decades ago.
Photographer Alicia Rius bases much of her work around searching for "hidden treasures". One particular series is titled "From the back seat of my car", and consists of unplanned photographs taken from the back of abandoned cars.
Artist Alexandre Farto has an interesting method of 'printing' large scale portrait photographs onto walls. Instead of using paint, he scratches paint away. Starting with a guide painted onto the wall using a stencil, Farto carefully scratches and chips paint and plaster away from walls using a jackhammer, pick, hammer, and his hands. His giant photos can be seen on abandoned buildings in cities around the world, including Moscow, London, and NYC.
Abandoned is an iPhone application by design group …