There have been a fair few books of photography of abandoned places published (or urbex photography, to use another name) and you could quite easily spend all your spare cash on them for the foreseeable future and still have only scratched the surface of them.
Naturalia: Reclaimed by Nature by Jonathan Jiminez is part of this ever-growing library or genre of photography books and caught my eye due to its specific subject matter.
As the title suggests, it focuses on abandoned places which have been reclaimed by nature, although it doesn’t strictly focus just on abandoned places/buildings but also takes in abandoned cars, military hardware etc.
As with much of this area of photography, there is a curious push-pull to the photographs and their subject matter, as they often contain both beauty and a lingering sense of loss or even melancholia:
“I travel the world in search of abandoned places. Over time, I have increasingly focused on what appears to be the most powerful element in this vast theme of abandonment: places taken over by Nature. It is poetic, almost magical, to see it creeping through broken windows and cracks, gradually taking back the spaces built and then abandoned by Man until they are almost completely swallowed up.” (Jonathan Jiminez quoted from his site.)
I’m particularly taken by the above photograph, in which nature’s “reclaiming” of a house seems to have turned it into a real world fairy tale evil witches house… while the photograph below could almost have tumbled from some distant future’s past where nature and city have long since stopped being divided.
Links at A Year In The Country:
- Seph Lawless’ Abandoned Theme Park Images and the Duality of a Library of Loss
- Further Bear’s Ghosts and Lost Dreams – from Soviet Era Space Shuttles to Hover Train Prototypes via Space 1999-esque River Transports
Links elsewhere:
