On Decay (Briefly)

I'VE always been fascinated by decay, urban or otherwise; the idea that the building before me, once the mise-en-scène for the living and all their concerns, is now a tomb of ghosts and historical echoes is something that provides a platform for the imagination's flights of fancy. A home with crooked doorframes and paint peeling from the walls, a church with vines curling through the windows, a factory with rusting machinery... all these beg for observers to decipher the clues to their histories, or in the absence of those clues, to attach new stories to them. I suppose that's why writers like Sebald and Proust appealed to me more than others, and why the book In Ruins by Christopher Woodward is one I still enjoy dipping into occasionally.

All that is a long and possibly superfluous segue to this link: Digital Photography School's "20 Beautiful Examples of Urban Decay Photography." And to make wading through those introductory ruminations just slightly more worthwhile, there's this link too: WebUrbanist's "Abandonment: 8 Cities That Might Not Make It."