Rebecca Bathory first fell in love with the decaying beauty of abandoned buildings when she photographed an abandoned school in 2012. This love took her on an adventure to 30 countries and over 500 locations, culminating in a photographic series she's calling Orphans of Time.
Photographing abandoned spaces has exploded in popularity in recent years. For photographer Karen Jerzyk, however, finding those spaces is only the first step. She transforms each one into what she describes as a "dark fairy tale" scene.
In this blog I would like to show you one of the scariest churches I have ever visited, back in March 2015. The church is located in a small town in the Czech Republic, and it was originally built in the 14th century.
The bedroom is one of the most personal spaces in a house, hotel, or any other kind of building. It’s a place where my imagination can go wild. When I stand in an abandoned bedroom I’d like to think, "What happened here?."
Nara Dreamland was a theme park in Japan that was built back in 1961 and inspired by Disneyland. After the number of visitors dropped, the theme park was permanently closed in 2006 and has been abandoned ever since. French photographer Victor Habchy took his camera into the run-down park to capture what it looks like after 10 years of neglect.
About 5 years ago, the last employees that worked here left. The company was bought by a Swiss giant in the industry and they decided to move the facility. The site this facility was built on was rented, but the new owners did not renew the contract.
For his book and project Abandoned Asylums, Ottawa, Canada-based photographer Matt Van der Velde took his camera into abandoned state hospitals, asylums, and psychiatric facilities across the United States.
The Inuits in the region call them "American Flowers," but in reality they're old, rusted, leaking fuel containers; ten thousand of them scattered across the otherwise-pristine Greenland landscape on what used to be an Air Force base during World War II.
Have you ever walked by a beautiful castle and wondered what was inside? I have... and I’m lucky that I have seen quite a few from the other side of the door.
This semi-abandoned power station located in Hungary is a true gem among industrial locations and was once Europe’s most advanced power station.
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.