I was clicking through my bloglines subscriptions just now and this post by Sweet Juniper jumped out at me.  Partially because I love photos of abandoned places, but also because one of them stuck out as being so nice…and because I saw it as being filled with so many possibilities.

When you look at this room, what do you see?  And what would you do with it?  I’d love to make it my “study.”  I don’t need a study…but wouldn’t this make a great one?

Head over to his blog to see the other three rooms…

And it’s clear that these two are ready for bed. Don’t they look menacing sitting there waiting for me?

They finally gave up and just got ready to snooze whether I decided to join them or not.

Man, this is precisely the thing I love about the weekend…even when it’s ending.  I hope everyone else out there had a great one as well.

Yesterday and today are being spent working at this old mill in central pennsylvania.  The weather has been nice, the food has been excellent, and cell phone reception has been noticeably absent.  But here are a few pics showing the loveliness of the setting:

You see Max, I adore your work!  There are so many of your pictures in my “inspiration file” just for photography styling alone that it pains me that you live so far away.  However, flying you in from Los Angeles is probably out of the question…so I thought I’d pen this lament in hopes that at least everyone on the west coast could see your brilliant work and hopefully fill your dance card with lots more work.

But just in case you happen to be in the Philadelphia area next June and would like to take a little visit to a farm and photograph a lovely couple, then okay fine.  Far be it from me to tell you no.  I mean…it only makes sense that it be you since I would just be comparing everyone else’s photos to yours and they’d never measure up.  *sigh*

Okay…well in case anyone else out there isn’t as unfortunate as me to live so far away from the talented Max Wanger, then stop over and peruse his lovely images.  Of course, you could also drop him a note telling him to move to Philadelphia as well.  I mean…I wouldn’t mind.

Nick has been working on a series of motel rooms.  I am of course always interested to see interiors of any kind, and for some reason we both share a love of weird motels.  These are a few of my favorites of his recent shots.

The Pineapple Motel

The Arns Motel

The Bill White Motel

The Welsh Motel

The Little Big Horn Motel

Now if only he could find a motel that had themed rooms…like “The Prince of Egypt room” or “The Taj Mahal Room.”  That is what my voyeuristic soul is hoping for next.  All photos by Nick Steever.

I’ve been meaning to post about stylist / creative director Faye Toogood for awhile now because I love her work so much.  It seems like often when I’ve seen one of those magical photo editorials (in the World of Interiors for instance) it was Faye who helped create it.   At any rate, these gorgeous images speak for themselves.

photographer: Bill Batten

photographer: Gregoire Alexandre

photographer: Tom Mannion

photographer: Tom Mannion

photographer: Tobias Harvey

Head over to her website for more deliciousness!  This was only just a taste after all!

Today has provided us with a huge rainstorm, and hail the size of acorns.  At least the clouds and light were spectacular.

First, I want to thank the commenter Sarah from my post the other day that recommended a link to Elena’s Motorcycle Rides through Chernobyl.  I spent several hours looking through her images and reading her story…as well as digging through flickr trying to find more images from other photographers.   I ended up discovering some work by Igor Kostin re-posted there, and was particularly engrossed by his images.   Horrifying though some of them were, it turns out that he is basically the only official photographer to have taken images of  what was happening in Chernobyl during the actual time of the disaster.

This led me to searching for the photography book  “Zones of Exclusion: Chernobyl and Pripyat” by Robert Polidori.  I became a fan of his photography after having seen some of his images up close and in person at an art show at the Armory in NYC several years back, but really became a true devotee after looking through his “After The Flood” collection about Hurricane Katrina.    Anyways I received the book in the mail today, and as I guessed his images were particularly compelling.  He has a true gift with a camera, and it was interesting to see the utter desolation left behind in the wake of such a large catastrophe.   Not just a home here or there, but entire cities and villages.  The immense scale of the area affected is what’s truly staggering.  Here are two images from the book.

Showing the deserted city of Pripyat, with large apartment buildings in the foreground.

These disaster pictures of Pripyat reminded me of  something more local that I’ve actually witnessed first hand.   Riding through rural pennsylvania (ironically on a motorcycle as well), I came upon the coal-mining town of Centralia.  There isn’t much left of it any longer except for streets that head to nowhere, one bench at an abandoned bus stop, a graveyard and about 4 houses.  You feel as if you’ve stepped into the twilight zone because every visible sign of life has disappeared…and there’s terrible smelling smoke rising from the ground.  All of this was caused by an underground fire in the coal mine that was accidentally started back in the late 70’s.  Today it’s a ghost town with all it’s inhabitants evacuated and moved on…everything is gone except the mine fire is still burning today all these years later.

Honestly, I’m not trying to be depressing…  but images like these really should serve as reminders for us to be stewards of the environment (on a macro level) and of our neighborhood & city (on a micro level).  Something that provides energy & jobs for the short term, also has the potential to destroy enormous swathes of land for hundreds of years…not to mention destroy thousands of lives.    Litter and broken windows may not be an obvious equivalent, but just the same can slowly erode the quality of life in a neighborhood and help lead to the increase of crime.

Let’s remember to do what we can each day while remaining hopeful for the future…and to aspire to learn from the mistakes of those that came before us.

Prior to moving to the Northeast back in 2002, I’d never experienced very many abandoned houses before.  I mean, of course, they exist all over the country…but never had I seen the sheer quantity of derelict & abandoned homes [and businesses] as I experienced here.  Philadelphia and it’s neighboring areas astonished me with the number of beautiful buildings that were left to fall apart.   It was inconceivable to me that art deco factories, craftsman bungalows, brick row houses, and huge colonial revival homes alike were left to suffer with broken window panes, grafitti and boarded up doors.   They all [still] remind me of a poem I read when I was in junior high school by the American poet Joyce Kilmer called “The House with Nobody In It.”

Although I find it particularly sad, I also find these abandoned places beautiful in a sense.  Sometimes as you stand and look at these structures, you can almost feel the environment trying to reclaim them and take back what man created.  As a person that’s obsessed with architecture, design and how people live, it’s hard for me to see these houses left all alone and broken like this.  But I almost feel that by taking a second to acknowledge each one with a long glance or a photograph, I’m paying homage in some way to the life once lived there and the effort put into constructing each one.

I began to go down this sentimental road today b/c I saw the post over at Charles & Hudson about photographer Kevin Bauman’s series of 100 Abandoned Houses featuring beautiful & desolate homes around the Detroit area.   The photo at left is one of his gorgeous pics, and I highly suggest you head over to his site to check it out.

It obviously made me think about the many places all across the country that are hauntingly similar.  Seeing as how I’ve been obsessed with this type of thing for awhile, here’s a few additional links that you might like (if you’re also into this sort of thing):

1. Photographer Laura Kicey’s collection of UnInhabitation.

2. Opacity’s collection of Abandoned Places.   The Staten Island ship graveyard is one of my favorites.

3. A selection of Robert Polidori’s Chernobyl photos.

4. And of course no collection would be complete without Robert Polidori’s book “After the Flood” featuring pics from after Hurricane Katrina.