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Culturegasm: Forbidden Places

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  1.  (707.1)
    Abandoned places, decaying and rotting, remain at some level the most beautiful of all places. And the site/project below is the best example of this:

    Forbidden-Places
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      CommentAuthorMark R
    • CommentTimeJan 28th 2008
     (707.2)
    Some awesome photos. Thanks for sharing the link.
    • CommentAuthorPablo
    • CommentTimeJan 28th 2008
     (707.3)
    That's great, really. I have a bit of a fascination with abandoned places, ghost towns and the like. I don't know what it is, just seeing images of them immediately makes me wonder what could have happened in these places in the past, what kind of people lived and worked there, etc.
  4.  (707.4)
    That's a gorgeous site! Thanks for the link. Really haunting images.
    I have my own abandoned space fetish, and have been doing a lot of photography in both an abandoned cafe and, in one of these images, a deserted rail station. Too bad they fenced off the BART access tunnels awhile back. I'll have to find another way to sneak models inside.
    By the way, not all of these shots are worksafe...

    rail station

    cafe 2

    cafe plastic
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      CommentAuthoranuchka
    • CommentTimeJan 29th 2008
     (707.5)
    I have a thing for Urban ruins.

    http://www2.ttcn.ne.jp/%7Ehexplorer/index.htm Japanese site about exploring abandoned structures (plus a section on proper attire). Great pictures!

    Lots of neat photos of forgotten buildings including a really nice section on Bannerman's Island on the Hudson (I explored there a few times as a child, it was hard to get to, thus photos are kind of rare) http://www.oboylephoto.com/ruins/index.htm
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      CommentAuthorroque
    • CommentTimeJan 29th 2008
     (707.6)
    part-- maybe most-- of the reason I love Japan so much is that it's full of decay. everyplace is worn-down, rusty, mildewed, and there are buildings falling apart on every streetcorner.

    I've got a ton of pictures, but most aren't online. here's one that is.

    here's another.
    • CommentAuthorPooka
    • CommentTimeJan 29th 2008
     (707.7)
    i love old abandoned buidings and archetecture. There's alot of awesome abandoned factories in KY as well as train stations and iron works...
    • CommentAuthorsacredchao
    • CommentTimeJan 30th 2008
     (707.8)
    That's an interesting site. I wouldn't mind trying something like that, but I'm not really sure how to go about it.
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      CommentAuthormrghosty
    • CommentTimeJan 30th 2008
     (707.9)
    Infiltration is a great place to get started if you're looking for information on urban exploration. The site (and zine's) founder ninjalicious passed away a few years ago but there are those who continue on doing the work in his name. It's really great stuff, one of the only zines I've continued to read over the years.. and the book is an amazing guide to getting started in urban spelunking.
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      CommentAuthortonymoore
    • CommentTimeJan 31st 2008
     (707.10)
    any of you guys near Kentucky ever go to Louisville's Waverly Hills Sanatorium? i lived in that town for 5 years and never took the time to go, which i regret. the place is freaking huge.

    -T
    • CommentAuthorPooka
    • CommentTimeJan 31st 2008
     (707.11)
    tony. We were supposed to go to a Horror convention there last year, and at the last minute they changed the location. We were really pissed. A couple of my customers said they went and took the tour, seeing all sorts of freaky things.
    I really want to go myself.
    I love places like that. Gotta take my camera...
  12.  (707.12)
    So excited to see this thread. I love these old, lost places and I was just plain sad to see the redevelopment of the east side of my hometown Birmingham, as there were so many strange, crooked old factories being gutted for the facade, or just knocked down.

    I will definitely be checking out the Infiltration stuff. Roque is right about Japan too, it's a mess of a country as far as urban development goes, so I'm going to see what I can do about finding some unloved treasures around here.

    I was lucky enough to rent rehearsal space for a while in a crazy old jewelery workshop, with a half collapsed second floor, a massive, echoing furnace room and an abandoned design office upstairs with a sliding, iron-bar security door and another door marked "Special Projects". If we'd stayed there any longer there would've been a home-made zombie movie in it, but we had to turn heels because we were sort of illegally subletting from a nutcase who we couldn't trust not to nick our gear. Oh and the entire ground floor flooded with a foot of water, which buggered a couple of amps. And it was once infested with swarms of ants. And since we were practicing in a huge brick and concrete room the sound was terrible, until we spent two weeks padding the place. Still, my favourite lock-up.
    • CommentAuthorPooka
    • CommentTimeJan 31st 2008
     (707.13)
    my mother used to work in a low funded psychiatric counceling center in the back section of a tiny hick town in kentucky called Prestonsburg. The elevator that lead up to the third flow had a pull across brass folding door and a window. While you were traveling up, you could look out the window and see a 2nd 1/2 floor with a little red steel door and a window that looked into a derelict long wooden room with dusty old junk piled up to either side. I got a creepy feeling every time I passed the floor. You could stop the elevator there with a switch, which was I think how it was accessed. I stopped it once for a few seconds just to look but got the creeps. It was dark but lit enought to see the back room in deep shadows. I kept expecting to see something moving, all silent hill like...
  14.  (707.14)
    Artist Robert Smithson wrote an essay called "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" back in 1967 in Artforum. He discussed these decaying industrial sites as sculptural monuments. One observation I had to go back and look up, because it's always held a JG Ballard ressonance to me:

    Seeing one of the "Your Highway Taxes at Work" at a construction site, he wrote:
    "That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is - all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built..."
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      CommentAuthororwellseyes
    • CommentTimeFeb 2nd 2008 edited
     (707.15)
    Forgotten Chicago has some beautiful photo-essays on parts of the city that are disused, falling apart or just evolved over.

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