Ghosts in the Landscape

Where do demolished buildings go when they die….

For over a decade I have been photographing buildings in the final days before their demolition, standing with them, in a sense, as a witness to what is about to be lost.

Again and again I have watched structures of beauty, history and community significance fall, not because renewal was impossible, but because a blank canvas was considered easier than the harder, more imaginative work of finding what could be saved.

When a building is gone, what remains is not nothing ..it is absence. A particular and painful kind of absence felt most keenly by those who lived there, worked there, or simply passed by every day. The landscape changes and the memory struggles to hold the shape of what was.

It is that struggle and my own nostalgia for these fallen buildings that this work inhabits. Sometimes, out in the open countryside photographing mountains, vast skies, empty fields I find myself thinking that the landscape is not enough, I think of these lost buildings. I imagine them existing somewhere else. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere they might reflect on the communities they sheltered, the lives that moved through them, the city they helped to make.

Ghosts in the Landscape gives those buildings a second existence. It is an act of remembrance, and a question about what we choose to keep, and what we too easily let go.