No Bookshelf is Complete without the Bible of American Abandonment

If you own one book on abandoned photography, it should be this one. I’ve been following Eric Hulubow’s work over the years, he was one of the first urbex photographers I discovered who spurred my obsession with forgotten places and took me further down the rabbit hole. His book, Abandoned – America’s Vanishing Landscape is a comprehensive…

Stop Everything, Check out these Miniature Mediocre Motels

Among my favourite things are mid-century American kitsch and teeny tiny stuff. Put the two together and you basically send me into overload. I’m not exactly sure why run-down vintage motels fascinate me so; perhaps that seedy glamour of America is much more appealing to a European road-tripper like me who hasn’t stayed in enough of them yet to have encountered bed bugs. But those pastel…

Art of the Damned: Sculptures made from Abandoned Spaces

Ian Strange isn’t your average sculptor. He doesn’t work with stone, metal, ceramics, wood or plaster to create his masterpieces. He uses abandoned buildings. From covering condemned facades in spray-paint or cutting out gaping holes in the roofs of homes destined for demolition to wrapping a historical building with 600 sq meters of gold wallpaper, Stange has used…

Step right up for the Amazing Time Travelling Photo Album

If this isn’t as close as you’ve come to stepping into a real time machine from behind your computer screen, well then … I’m guessing you probably have an actual time machine back there. “The Old New World” is a Photo-based animation project by a Moscow-based digital artist, Alexey Zakharov and by opening a peculiar steampunk photo album,…

The Barbershop Clubhouses of South Africa

I‘m currently going through the early stages of a re-design for this site and trying to decide on a theme I like for the header. My ideas range from a route 66 diner, a lighthouse, to an old world Parisian newspaper kiosk. Maybe a combination of them all? I’m basically a designer’s worst nightmare. And now I’m tempted…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CLXXXIV)

1. The House Donald Trump couldn’t Buy Vera Coking’s Atlantic City, New Jersey, home, which Donald Trump attempted to acquire through eminent domain to build limousine parking for his casino (photo by Jack Boucher/Historic American Buildings Survey). Find the full article on Holdouts: The Solitary Resisters of Real Estate, found on Hyperallergic. 2. Liveable Manholes…

Mona Lisa and Machine Guns: Was Leonardo daVinci an Aspiring War Lord?

When you think of Mona Lisa’s peaceful smile, you probably wouldn’t imagine it was captured by the same man who invented the world’s first machine gun. You knew da Vinci was a multi-talented visionary; free-thinker, architect, painter, scientist among many things, but aspiring war lord? Take a look through the blueprints of his lesser-known inventions, and it might start…

You can now Rent Julia Child’s Provencale Kitchen as she Left It, via Airbnb

A copy of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, dog-eared, heavily scribbled in with my mother’s notes and covered with her gravy stains, will one day be passed on to me as a family heirloom. I didn’t know it then, but my childhood in Provence probably wouldn’t have tasted the same if it wasn’t for Julia…

The Vault

How to Mess with the Nazis: The CIA’s Sabotage Manual for Ordinary Citizens

Trolling the Nazis. Sounds like fun right? During World War II, the OSS, (now the CIA) put out a “Sabotage Field Manual”, which described innovative ways in which ordinary citizens could sabotage America’s enemies by doing a range of disruptive things from starting arguments to starting fires. The OSS Director William J. Donovan recommended that the…

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All the Colour they Left Behind

Man oh man, do I need to get a look at this photographer’s address book. Mattias Haker is up there with the best abandoned photographers I’ve seen. And I like that he’s not shy with the saturation, highlighting all those vibrant colours that were left to fade over time. You can tell he spends a lot of…