A GHOST TOWN INSIDE AFRICA
There's a reason that ghost towns are empty. Maybe a nearby
precious resource, like oil or gold, was wholly depleted. Perhaps it was a
natural disaster, or a man-made one. The highway was rerouted, or the river
diverted. Maybe disease struck, or famine.
Whatever the cause, the resulting tableaus of decay and
desolation have fascinated artists for centuries. Renaissance painters were
captivated by Roman ruins, including the Forum and the Colosseum; artists in
the 19th century were obsessed with the remains of ancient Egyptian
civilizations unearthed by archeological expeditions. Below, we've gathered a
more contemporary cohort interested in capturing abandoned urban spaces.
Noel Kerns
"It's almost all trespassing," American
photographer Noel Kerns told Slate of
his shoots. "Seldom do I have permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness
if you need it. In general, most people don't care, and most people don't find
out." Kerns, who is based in Dallas, Texas, has been capturing the
abandoned houses, churches, and schools of American ghost towns since 2007,
when he learned the technique of "light painting," a style of night
photography that incorporates artificial lighting and long exposures to create
images awash in color.
In Kern's work, derelict and dilapidated buildings appear to
glow from within, illuminating empty windows and doorways in shades of red or
blue. They're undeniably uncanny -- but Kerns said he doesn't often feel
spooked during these trips, even while shooting alone in the dark. "It's
probably disappointing to most people, but in general, it doesn't bother me as
much as you would think," he said.
There have been a few notable exceptions, though: an old
hotel in Detroit where he couldn't shake the sense he was being followed; an
empty church in Gary, Indiana, where he walked over something sticky that, upon
closer inspection, appeared to be partially dried blood. "That was an
extremely uneasy feeling," he recalled.
Romain Veillon
French photographer Romain Veillon has been fascinated by
abandoned spaces since childhood, when he spent his summers exploring an old
truck factory owned by his grandmother. Now, his practice centers around
capturing the beauty of these forgotten, deteriorating sites. "When I
encounter such a place," he explained, "my goal is that everybody can
travel in the past with me and make up their own stories: Why was this place
abandoned? What happened to the former owners? What used to happen in this
room?"
The questions are particularly compelling in the case of
Kolmanskop, a former diamond-mining town in Namibia where sands have partially
reclaimed the buildings. Established in 1908, the town quickly became a hub of
the region. Legend has it that the diamonds were so plentiful, one could simply
stroll across the sand at night to find the precious stones sparkling in the
moonlight.
But following World War I, a drop in the price of diamonds
and the discovery of a larger deposit in the south pulled people away. By 1956,
the town was abandoned. Today, small tour groups visit around noon each day,
but Vellion said that for the most part, it is quiet and empty. During the week
he spent shooting in Kolmanskop, he would arrive around 5 a.m. "to watch
how the sun changed the colors of the rooms little by little," he said.
"The atmosphere was completely unreal, you feel like it is another planet;
or maybe Earth, but centuries after the last man has disappeared."
SEPH LAWLESS
American photojournalist Seph Lawless
documented the town of Picher, Oklahoma, once America's leading producer of
zinc and lead. Credit: Seph Lawless
According to local legend, the town of Picher, Oklahoma, was
created by accident. In 1914, the Picher Lead Company of Joplin, Missouri, sent
workers to deliver equipment to a site in Oklahoma. Their truck got mired in
the mud, however, and to relieve their boredom, the men drilled a hole.
Surprisingly, they hit something -- a thick vein of zinc and lead. The company
set up shop, and the town of Picher sprung up around the new mines.
By the 1920s, the area was the country's number-one producer
of the two metals and the source of most metal used in ammunition in World War I
and II. When the mines began to run dry in the 1960s, most companies packed up
and left. In the end, however, that wasn't what killed the town: The mining had
resulted in extremely high levels of lead poisoning among residents, along with
a spike in cancer rates, leading the Environmental Protection Agency to dub the
town and its surrounding area the most contaminated place in America. The
government began buying out residents' homes in 2005, closing the town for good
in 2009.
American photojournalist Seph Lawless has visited Picher
several times over the years. The town is technically closed off, and for good
reason -- extensive mining underneath much of the town made the ground unstable
and prone to collapse.
"At one point, my foot actually fell through the ground
as a huge sinkhole began opening up and I jumped to safety," Lawless
recalled. "There's an eerie silence as I walked around the ghost town
alone. I didn't hear birds or see any signs of life -- it was surreal."
The wind blew tiny bits of rock against his face. Known as chat, this fine
gravel is a byproduct of zinc and lead mining, and huge mounds of it ring the
town like a mountain range.
The photos reveal a desolate town, made up of a handful of
dilapidated buildings that line a road of cracked asphalt. The clouds are
threatening, hanging low and dark against the sky. But the interiors are
equally apocalyptic: Brightly patterned clothes are hung up, left behind by a
previous tenant -- a reminder of the residents who were paid to move out of the
town. In one abandoned front yard, a lone wicker chair remains.
Valerie Anex
Photographer and filmmaker Valérie Anex documented unfinished
housing developments that were abandoned during the recession in Ireland.
From the mid-1990s through the late 2000s, the Irish economy
experienced a growth period so ferocious, it was dubbed the "Celtic
Tiger." The housing market was particularly brisk: Homes were being built
in unprecedented numbers, at a per-capita rate four times higher than that of
the United States. Then, in 2007, things started to go south: The bubble burst,
and properties built on cheap, rural land could no longer be sold; sometimes,
the investors were so broke that they couldn't complete the projects.
Thus, Ireland came to be littered with thousands of so-called
"ghost estates" -- by 2011, they numbered more than 3,000. Among
them, 621 housing developments were, at most, only half finished or occupied.
(Since then, the number has been dramatically reduced, according to a 2017 report.) Photographer and filmmaker
Valérie Anex, who was born in Switzerland and is now based in Berlin, first
encountered the phenomenon during a visit to her grandmother's home in 2010.
The following year, Anex spent three weeks driving across northwest Ireland to photograph the ghost estates. It wasn't hard to find them, she said -- she simply followed the billboards on the highway advertising houses for sale. She also checked online, where outraged citizens were using Google Maps to compile lists of these empty housing developments.
It wasn't an enjoyable experience. "Sometimes I
wondered, 'Why am I doing this? It's so creepy,'" she recalled.
"Every time I left one of these estates, I had this feeling of relief,
thinking I'm so happy I'm not living there, I don't have to spend any more time
here."
Yet there were (and still are) people living among these
ghost estates -- homeowners who bought their property at the peak of the
housing bubble and can now only sell for a fraction of the price. "They are
basically kept captive in this sad environment," Anex noted. Although she
encountered many of these people during her shoot, she didn't include them in
her series because, as she reasoned, "the system is not made for people.
(The ghost estates are) a symptom of the capitalist economy going wild, going
on credit; there was no real demand for these houses. These houses were not
made for anyone."
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