Samantha VanDeman's No Vacancy series might look like ruin porn, a genre of photography heavily criticized for how it fetishizes destruction and poverty. But instead of making kitschy art from what’s left, she tries to bring life to abandoned spaces.
She has long found her way into abandoned motels to photograph what remains. Her photography concentrates on the objects she finds inside; she hopes seeing them helps viewers understand that real people experiencing real things occupied those long-forgotten rooms.
“I know this sounds silly, but in some ways I feel like I’m rescuing the objects or spaces,” she says.
The project started in 2009 when VanDeman drove by the boarded up Purple Hotel near her home in Chicago and decided on a whim to explore it. The hotel, built in 1960, was Hyatt’s first in the Midwest and its Chicago flagship for many years. It closed in 2007 and was in complete disrepair when VanDeman found her way in.
She shot an old hotel in Gary, Indiana, and then, while searching the internet for abandoned hotels, came across the old resort town of Sharon Springs, New York. Known for its mineral springs and beautiful setting, Sharon Springs was a place where presidents---Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt---and families like the Vanderbilts once vacationed. It later became a popular destination for middle-class Jewish families.
Business started to decline in the 1980s, however, and by the '90s the place was a shell of its former self. When VanDeman got there in 2012, she photographed five once-famous hotels that are now abandoned: The Columbia, the Adler, the Washington, the Empire, and the Imperial Baths.
The Adler provided one of her favorite photos, which shows a room with framed print of two zebras. Below it lie a striped pillow and a phone in the middle of a striped bed. The serendipity of stripes would be one thing, but the rotary relic was in so awkward a position that you can’t help but wonder who used it last. The objects begin to create what VanDeman calls a sort of portrait of the space and the people who used to stay there.
“Building these portraits helps me form a real connection with the space,” she says.
Creeping around abandoned spaces can be dangerous, but VanDeman says she’s only had one confrontation. Back in Gary a homeless person threatened her with a screwdriver, but it ended without incident.
All the photos are shot digitally, but VanDeman says she moves slowly and takes her time because she never knows if she’ll be able to get back in. Several of the locations where she's made pictures have since been demolished, including the Purple Hotel, which was torn down last year.
Alongside and in conversation with No Vacancy, VanDeman has also been shooting another items-left-behind project called Died Alone. That story is about the abandoned homes of elderly people who’ve died alone in the Midwest. She says it’s fairly common to find houses where the owner had no family to recover the objects, or the family was too far away and never bothered to come back.
Died Alone is personal because VanDeman was her grandmother's primary caretaker and had to sort through her belongings when she died in 2006. Sorting and photographing dead people’s possessions might seem like a difficult project, but VanDeman says it’s about storytelling.
“I know it sounds dark,” she says. “But I just think these personal objects have a lot to tell us.”
