Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Industrial Decomposition


Today I was introduced to this idea of Industrial Decomposition, the authentic recording of the abandoned remnants of our industrial enterprises.

What we saw today was amazing. The photographs were beautiful. Abandoned factories, schools, power stations..some quite beautiful..with nature "reclaiming" them. Many of these places are left with all their paperwork and other objects.

This slow breakdown of human's creations back to the natural elements is kind of interesting to me. Haunting places. With a gothic feel. Made me think of our "throw away" cultures...only these are massive throw aways. Although where I live we don't have large areas of industrial ruin, we do have some examples. Detroit and Eastern Europe seem to have huge tracts of industrial wasteland.

Apparently a good place to start exploring this is the blog, link below:

http://industrialdecay.blogspot.com/

Or grab the camera and start exploring your own environment. Something I've been meaning to do is take a trip to the outback..there's a place I know with whole settlements abandoned. Empty houses, school, church, with lace curtains, ball rooms and ornate fireplaces. All windswept and beginning to be taken over by the natural elements...sand, animals, spiders, creepers, trees. Early 20th century white farmer settlers often started off in unusually good seasons which gave a false sense of the rainfall and the productivity of the land. Within decades some discovered just how dry and harsh the inland Australian landscape can be.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for finding this link as you have made my day.

    Back in 2005 I photographed a number of sites that since have been torn down and replaced with other structures, for this is Northern California were land is at a premium.

    Middle America has places that have plenty empty structures but I am too far away for a photographic outing.

    Wishing you a wonderful week, what is left of it.
    Egmont

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  2. It seems to me that it is exactly the stay of decay that is appealing in old architecture, be it a church, castle, factory. Why the well maintained sights don't have that appeal of history as those where you can almost touch the time flying by. It is more interesting to watch the old house being repaired than walk around it after it had been repaired. This occurred to me in Crete where they certainly don't take care of their abandoned Byzantine churches and Venetian castles and there you feel... something special, first you feel like you discovered them, second, the churches have old icons and candles in them, traces of the activity of the past.

    Yes, Eastern Europe has abandoned industrial places, people go and wander around, those who look for something to steal as well as those who go there for the atmosphere. I think that medieval castles must have felt the same for people in the 19th century, they were huge, kind of ugly and abandoned. Haunted.

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  3. Thank you for the link, those photographs are just amazing.

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  4. Thanks for sharing the link. Living in the Midwest, I find we have many small towns that are becoming abandoned. They also make for some interesting photos. It's sad how one place can be so productive and vibrant, and then not so much. The small town where I live looks "ghost town" like, and with the economy as it is, some of the buildings are being let go. They have never been updated and remain looking as if they are from another time anyway...so when they do become abandoned it seems they have been so for a much longer time frame.

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  5. Maggie...we have many of those towns here too, inland. Sad to see. The decline of the some rural industry and agriculture, the changing rain patterns and the attraction of urban areas to the young people all play a part.

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