my name is mwd: photos

I like this picture for many reasons, but it’s also an image that troubles me at the same time.

As a photographer and an engineer, I find the ruined and decaying remains of our society interesting. It’s interest in terms of aesthetics to see what becomes of our things when we no longer care for them, and its interesting from an engineering perspective in that it exposes that which was hidden away, showing the inner workings that we usually pretend are not there. It’s also interesting from a societal context of what we choose is worth reclaiming and re-using, and that which we just abandon.

But when photographing a scene like this there’s a conflicting sense that whatever happened here didn’t end well, and one can only hope that no one was harmed in the process that leads to the scene.

It’s the flip side of the common photographer’s trope of things like this - they look pretty, but they also have a history. All those abandoned buildings that line Route 66 we see on instagram that look lovely (and I’m a fan of such work) must have at the heart of them a sad tale of someone who couldn’t keep up a mortgage or a failed business whose custom dried up.

That doesn’t make it bad to take such pictures, but I think it makes them interesting in a way that we tend not to think about before we swipe onto the next picture.