Castello di Sammezzano (Non Plus Ultra) has to be the most beautiful castle in Italy. Often called abandoned, it's not actually so; every once in a while it is opened to the public for a guided tour and volunteers take care of the place. At the moment it is being auctioned to the highest bidder.
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.
Russian urban exploration photographer Ralph Mirebs recently paid a visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where inside a giant abandoned hangar are decaying remnants of prototypes from the Soviet space shuttle program.
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.
Photographer CJ from substormflow is passionate about exploring sewer systems, and he wants to show the world the unique underground architecture that most people never get to see. The video above is a glimpse into the hidden system of old culverts and sewers beneath the bustling city of Manchester in England.
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.
Here's a 5-minute video by Seeker Stories about how young urban explorers are connecting through Instagram and teaming up to explore the hidden places of New York City. They risk arrest -- and often death -- to see and photograph the city from perspectives that ordinary people will never get to experience.
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."
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.
Johnny Joo is a name you might recognize. Not too long ago we featured a series of images Joo captured at a ‘train graveyard’ hidden in the forests of North Carolina. This time, we’re back with some more recent urbex work of his that takes us into the ruins of an abandoned film school that was chock full of items that are doubly interesting to us as photographers.
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.
The dangers of urban exploration photography are well-known. However, despite this danger, it’s not often we hear of any big names in Urbex photography having major accidents or run-ins with the law. That changed a bit this week when a photographer who goes by the pseudonym The Other Side shared the story of how he was threatened with serious legal consequences for photographing a partially abandoned French factory.
Cleveland-based photographer Seph Lawless's first job was in a bustling Ohio mall. Today, that same mall appears in his photo series and book Black Friday: The Collapse of the American Shopping Mall -- a haunting series that pays homage to these victims of the recession and the online shopping revolution.
His photos really need no further introduction, and so instead of spending time describing what you could simply scroll down and see, we sat down with Lawless (digitally) to talk about the hows and whys behind this eerie photo book.
New York City culture site Animal recently teamed up with photographer and urban explorer 2e to document the making of some photographs in his collection “Exploring Off-Limits New York.”
From Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory to The UnderBelly Project, the video and accompanying story takes a look at some of 2e's not-so-legal and potentially dangerous adventures.
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.