Ruin porn, the more benign cousin of slum tourism, often is slammed for opportunistically making art out of decay and disaster.
But for every gratuitous photo essay of dilapidated houses in Detroit, there’s work like Matt Emmett's. The British photographer spent three years traveling Europe, exploring abandoned buildings, forgotten factories, dilapidated libraries, and grimy industrial plants that are as enlightening as they are gritty. The photos are “a form of preservation, of preserving history,” Emmett says.
Take for instance a jet engine manufacturing plant: “It’s been demolished now and it’s responsible for most of the fighter jets the UK has produced in the past several years. The planes like the Tornado, Vulcan Bomber, the Typhoon Eurofighter, and the Concord had its engines built there. It was hugely important from a historical point of view. When the government decided to demolish it they made no preservation at all---they just bulldozed. One of the first places in the world where the jet engine was born. It’s a really important site, and nothing remains of it now.”
Emmett---who wears a hard hat while exploring and photographing---has shot 60 or 70 locations in the UK, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, and they’re all off limits. Emmett finds them because he belongs to a British urbex (“urban explorers”) community of around 1,000 photographers who keep tabs on these abandoned locations and discreetly share their coordinates with each other. Everyone is vetted or vouched for to prevent vandals or graffiti artists from tampering with or defacing the old architecture and making them too ugly to photograph.
And that’s entirely the point: photographing these places for posterity. “To me they’re more impressive than your average world heritage site, like the pyramids or Angkor Wat,” Emmett says. “People would never consider them tourist attractions because they’re derelict abandoned places, but the atmosphere you get in there is utterly different. These power stations, these vast industrial spaces, they are utterly silent. To me, they beat going to Machu Picchu.”
