Modern ruins in photographs

Despite the manic name, Mustard Gas Party offers a gallery of quiet, melancholy images, modern ruins, haunted spaces.

Comments

[Gardner Campbell]

Wow. Unheimlich to the max. Creeping Evening is my favorite so far.

I love this site. I'm in your debt (again).

[zephyrin_xirdal]

In march 2005 a book matching this topic will be published:

EDENSOR, TIM. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg.

There's no info yet on Berg's website, so I type it in from the printed catalogue:
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Across Western cities, there is an increasing obsession with producing manicured landscapes. Standing in contrast to these aesthetically and socially regulated spaces are the neglected sites of industrial ruins, places on the margin that accommodate transgressive and playful activities. Providing a different aesthetic to the over-coded, over-designed spaces of the city, ruins evoke an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality.

Edensor highlights the danger of eradicating such evocative urban sites through policies that privilege homogeneous new developments. It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. These ruins blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and sense of place.

Stunningly illustrated throughout, this book celebrates industrial ruins and reveals what they can tell us about ourselves and our past.
***
I immediately had associations to the obsession of "my cyberian tribe", the Max-Payne-gamemodders, with worndown noir urban landscapes and the Gibsonian Sprawl-vision.

[Lorenzo Amaduzzi]

If you want to look at my personal vision of industrial ruins, visit my temporary website, please. Any comment will be helpful. L.A.