Urban Exploration

August 5, 2009

Several months ago I was searching through Flickr looking at random shots and categories when I came across a few photos that really caught my eye. They were shot in old, beat up, dilapidated buildings somewhere. They were shots from photographers who do what they call “Urban Spelunking” or “Urban Exploration”. It seems there’s a type of photographer who travels around into empty buildings and takes photos of what they find there. Many times they’ve no idea what they’ll find. Some find dead animals, others find squatters, maybe they find nefarious former drug use, or home less people’s homes. But many find beauty in the decayed, the dusty, the forgotten. These photographers aren’t there to steal, they aren’t there to harm, they aren’t there to destroy.

Recently I’ve been drawn to a few run down, empty houses near my work, and while it’s more suburban exploration, I found myself there one afternoon recently walking through broken houses, capturing what was once the family home, almost invading the private memories of a people. I shot my first UE (as some call Urban Exploration) shoot and hurried home to process the images. I am from Pittsburgh and now live in the desert far from the urban. As I search places to shoot, I kick myself that I wasn’t aware of this style when lived in near the closed up factories of the memories and nostalgia of the factory towns. For now, for that, check out Forgotten Pittsburgh on Flickr; this is my cousin’s website who has some collections and sets from this sort of exploration. As for me, I shoot in the southwest for now.

It is true that many of these people are trespassing, and it’s true that urban explorers need to be careful (think rotting floors, tetanus, and animals), but this photography style isn’t one of illegality, or harm, or of destroying property; it’s of capturing a progression of time, a place, a space, an image that will never be again ever. We, as Urban Explorers, are recorders of space, of time standing still, the immortality of these places.

Posted in photography