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"Abandoned buildings Pictorial works."
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A fantastic state of ruin : the painted towns of Rajasthan
This book tells the story of the painted towns of Shekhawati in rural Rajasthan, India. For centuries, the painted buildings served the towns as trading houses, pleasure palaces, temples, caravansaries, and private homes. Following independence, the descendants of the merchant families left Shekhawati for India's burgeoning cities, abandoning their opulent structures. Some were left in the charge of caretakers; squatters took up residence in many; most simply remain vacant. The buildings have slowly deteriorated over time, ravaged by climate and neglect, and now lie scattered among the desert settlements as an elegiac collection of beautiful living ruins--a crumbling open-air gallery set amid the ordinary affairs of small town life. This book portrays the fascinating ruinous beauty of the painted towns, and, along the way, provides an intimate look at life and landscape on the arid fringes of Rajasthan. This world, too, is fading, and so the book's photographs, in the end, are a visual study of both place and society at the edge of time.
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The Color of Loss
The devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has been imprinted in our collective visual memory by thousands of images in the media and books of dramatic photographs by Robert Polidori, Larry Towell, Chris Jordan, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, and others. New Orleanians want the world to see and respond to the destruction of their city and the suffering of its people—and yet so many images of so much destruction threaten a visual and emotional overload that would tempt us to avert our eyes and become numb. In The Color of Loss, Dan Burkholder presents a powerful new way of seeing the ravaged homes, churches, schools, and businesses of New Orleans. Using an innovative digital photographic technology called high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, in which multiple exposures are artistically blended to bring out details in the shadows and highlights that would be hidden in conventional photographs, he creates images that are almost like paintings in their richness of color and profusion of detail. Far more intense and poetic than purely documentary photographs, Burkholder's images lure viewers to linger over the artifacts of people's lives—a child's red wagon abandoned in a mud-caked room, a molding picture of Jesus—to fully understand the havoc thrust upon the people of New Orleans. In the deserted, sinisterly beautiful rooms of The Color of Loss, we see how much of the splendor and texture of New Orleans washed away in the flood. This is the hidden truth of Katrina that Dan Burkholder has revealed.
eBook
Asylum : inside the closed world of state mental hospitals
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals.For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings-and the patients who lived in them-neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors (some designed by such prominent architects as H. H. Richardson and Samuel Sloan) and crumbling interiors-chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks (who described his own experience working at a state mental hospital in his book Awakenings). Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, \"where one could be both mad and safe.\"
eBook
America rewind
Traveling across the United States, the French photographer Emmanuel Georges went in search of the American dream. Using a large-format camera and a documentary-style approach, he captured the reality of America encountered during his journey. At the same time, his photographs reveal a finely tuned understanding of the poetry unique to these places. The result is a kind of photographic road trip of more than twenty thousand kilometers: from the former capital of the automobile industry, Detroit, to Butte, Montana, once a mining city and now half-deserted; through the Rust Belt from Pennsylvania to Arkansas, formerly flourishing cities tell the story of the disappearance of an economic boom long gone. Georges's recurring motifs--decaying faًcades of industrial buildings, garages, motels, movie theaters--become iconic images of American urban landscapes. Profoundly permeated by an omnipresent sense of melancholy, the empty streets, old cars, and abandoned gas stations are testimony to the end of the American dream.
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Abandoned in Place
Stenciled on many of the deactivated facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the evocative phrase “abandoned in place” indicates the structures that have been deserted. Some structures, too solid for any known method of demolition, stand empty and unused in the wake of the early period of US space exploration. Now Roland Miller’s color photographs document the NASA, Air Force, and Army facilities across the nation that once played a crucial role in the space race.
Rapidly succumbing to the elements and demolition, most of the blockhouses, launch towers, tunnels, test stands, and control rooms featured in Abandoned in Place are located at secure military or NASA facilities with little or no public access. Some have been repurposed, but over half of the facilities photographed no longer exist. The haunting images collected here impart artistic insight while preserving an important period in history.
eBook
Dark city
'Dark city' is a natural sequel to Lynn Saville's colour photographs in Night/Shift (Monacelli, 2009). Her work in that book made her, in the words of Arthur C. Danto, \"the Atget of vanishing New York, prowling her city at the other end of the day, picking up pieces of the past in the present, just before it is swallowed in shadows.\" This book is a further exploration of the urban landscape at dusk and dawn, with a new focus on the effects of the recent economic turmoil on New York and other American cities. Shuttered stores and empty lots in city centers and fringe areas alike reveal a haunting and disquieting beauty. Occasionally, a person or the artist herself is visible as a ghosted image or shadow. Photographs in 'Dark city' also counter-balance signs of loss with a more optimistic message. They reveal a natural cycle of decay and rebirth in urban ecology, as objects such as ladders and brooms signal that the work of renewal is under way. 'Dark city' is ultimately a dynamic and ongoing dialogue between defined place and empty space that will fascinate general readers and urban specialists alike.
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