A Compendium of Abandoned Greenhouses

Today I opened my computer and typed in my chosen search words of the day: “abandoned greenhouse“. Little did I know how many photographs I was about to scroll through. So many, too many! Why is that? Surely we still all eat greens and enjoy decorating our houses with them. Why have so many of these…

The Car Park Theatre of Detroit

Detroit’s haunting decline has been so well documented by urban explorers that to the outside world, it might seem like it’s the only thing to know about this once great industrial metropolis. And yet undeniably, it’s vast urban abandonment is intensely interesting. My latest guilty fascination is the Detroit’s renaissance revival theatre that has ended up…

Ruins of Detroit: Before & After

I keep coming back to Detroit. It’s bizarre how photogenic the downfall of America’s industrial powerhouse can be. However there’s an eerie and unwanted sense of responsibility to be felt when looking through these before & after photographs of Detroit taken in 1973 and 2010 by the same photographer, Dave Jordano. I could browse through endless…

Nearly 50 Years On, a Forbidden Seaside Ghost Town is about to Re-Open

Imagine a millionaire’s resort; one to rival St. Tropez, Italy’s Portofino, or Miami’s South Beach – abandoned overnight. Imagine the luxury hotels suddenly emptied of their guests and left to slowly decay, the boutiques, bars and nightclubs reclaimed by nature, sunbathers replaced by sea turtles nesting on the deserted beaches and the once vibrant holiday…

Inside the Real-Life “Hunger Games” City: A Decaying Parisian Utopia

We’re quite spoilt here in Paris, surrounded by elegant cream-colored stone Haussmanians, gifted with pockets of bucolic cobblestone streets and charmed by old-world cafés and façades. But stray to the suburbs of Eastern Paris and you’ll find what looks like an alternate universe in comparison, a failed post-war “city of Babel” with Pharaonic structures of decaying…

What’s Left of a Cartel Cop’s Palace Playground

If you look up the definition of “police corruption” in the dictionary, there should really be a photograph of Arturo “El Negro” Durazo Moreno, the infamous Chief of Police in Mexico City, from 1976 to 1982. While his official job earned him less than $1,000 a month, Durazo made a fortune off the cocaine drug trade and…

The Suburban Paris Ghost Town

Paris lies is the center of Ile-de-France, the most populated region in the country with more residents than Austria, Belgium, Greece, Portugal or Sweden alone. It boasts the world’s fourth-largest and Europe’s wealthiest and largest regional economy. But one small corner of the region paints a very different picture. Just a thirty minute drive north…

Exploring Tommy Suharto’s Ghost Hotel

Of all the stories of crazed dictators and corrupt regimes built on nepotism, the Suharto legacy might just be the most scandalous. The youngest son to one of the most brutal leaders in recent history, Tommy Suharto’s tale fits somewhere on the same shelf as Pablo Escobar’s and Kim Jung Un’s. Playboy embezzler, convicted murderer,…

The Vault

A Counterfeit Dreamland Lost

When I share a new photographer’s (or anyone’s) work on this blog, I guess the ultimate hope is that they might get in contact one day with the news that they just had a sold out show or scored a publishing deal for their own book. Well recently, that hope finally became a reality when…

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Watch this Best-selling Author confront the Real Haunted Houses from his Book

We look at a lot of photographs of abandoned places here but it can be a real treat to find beautifully shot and narrated film footage to really take us on a journey inside these forgotten time capsules. Author Ransom Riggs wanted to make sure the setting for his haunting upcoming novel was true to life, so…