The Urban Exploration Endless Slideshow

I’ve been homebound nursing a sore throat all weekend and in a reduced state of mental facility barely capable of scrolling through facebook walls and first person shooters. Anyway, on Veteran’s Day in the U.S. yesterday there was clearly something in the air as people seemed to keep posting links to photos of abandoned buildings – in the States and abroad. Lots of links… different stuff. All was compelling viewing. The last one I saw clearly stood out. It was the product of a single vision – the photos of Dan Raven.

Who this person was even seemed mysterious… similar names and subject matter showed up in different places. Was this one man? A Collective? A Coincidence? Some links have been left out to protect the innocent. As near as I can work out, these are: his blog | his bio on National Geographic | his entries on Urban Earth | His flickr stream

It is possible these are two people with very similar names and interests that I’ve somehow conflued together.

There had been a few photo sets that have floated my way — more often recently then there had been — of abandoned libraries in Michigan and the like… But yesterday was a flood.

Other pieces of news I read seemed to tie in to a prevailing theme of infrastructural collapse, neglect and despair. Bits of facts wove a pattern of declining populations, low sex drives and more systems failures; all against the face of actual explosions of information and population. In the meanwhile incomprehensible devastation — that would never have the same weight in the western cultural narrative as Timmy down the well — played out in the Philippines. We thanked those who sacrificed for what we have and stared at high dynamic range photos of rotting old buildings.

These were the other shared galleries… you may have seen them already.

The 33 Most Beautiful Abandoned Places In The World on Imgur

These Abandoned Toy Factories and Shops Will Haunt Your Nightmares on i09

Abandoned but Beautiful on Dusky’s Wonders

Here’s a new one this morning: Extraordinary abandoned buildings on The Telegraph

I feel that these things are related:

A Bridge to Nowhere in L.A.

Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets – The Guardian

Oh, and that top photo… it’s a screen grab from Valve’s HDR demo game Half Life 2: Lost Coast