"It's funny how one can explore something that was once open and lived through without a second thought yet years later, its whole meaning has changed and has tasted time in a whole different way." ~Armando Torres
The administration building at Belchertown State School is the second most architecturally interesting building on campus. As strange as it sounds, after reading Ben Ricci's book Crimes Against HumanityI actually took the book with me and reread his description of his first walk up those stairs to admit his son Robert to Belchertown. The red metal door that is now at the top of the stairs was added when the building was closed down. The original doors that, judging by the door frame, must have been double wooden doors were most likely removed but the double doors inside still remain and lead up a second set of stairs to a large expanse of glass and counter that would have once been the reception area. To the left is a smaller office behind a more modern glass wall with a round opening and a small slot for sliding paperwork through. Behind the glass is a giant, ancient looking switchboard, an old rotary phone, and shreds of yellowed paperwork. All in all, the feeling created in that first glance is one of overwhelming imposition.
I was 6 years old when my father first handed me a Pentax A1000 35mm SLR. We were on a beach in Cape Cod and he was teaching me how to focus on a ship in the distance, bobbing on the horizon of the Atlantic.
Twenty two years later I still have, and shoot with, that Pentax. I’ve since upgraded and added a Sony a100 DSLR to my collection as well as adopting a Mamiya RB67 medium format portrait camera but my love of photography hasn’t changed much since the first time I saw, on paper, what I had seen through my lens.
The bulk of my work the last few years has focused on abandoned structures, specifically mental institutions and state schools.
"People are like the abandoned buildings you explore, just in an ever changing way. There are moments and spaces in our lives that feel just like the photos you take, and then those same spaces get filled with just one elegant find and you forget about the morbid beauty of the building and find something else."
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