"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
This has to be one of my favorite graf pieces from yesterday's shoot. The colors practically assault you when you pull up to the wall and they just begged to be photographed. The fabulous talent behind this art is obvious in the glowing "III" off to the right of the piece that knows how to draw your eye just right.
Since it's now midnight and I've been out shooting all day, I'll make this brief and give you a quick preview of one of the crazy sick pieces of grafitti that I shot today. Watching the artists at work definitely gave me a newfound respect for the talent that these individuals have. This is the first of many as I took about 400 something frames today so check back soon to see the rest!
Camp Columbia once served as a summer camp for engineering students from Columbia University, a member of the prestigious Ivy League. Historical photos of the camp show the inherent beauty in the location and the craftsmanship in each building, a portion of which is still alive and well in the details of this door surrounded by a beautiful stone wall. The interior of this cottage, in spite of having been completely stripped, pointed to a continued tradition of architectural beauty that made these buildings unique.
The tower pictured here was built by the Columbia University class of 1902, presumably engineering students. The most disappointing part of the day was discovering that there is no way up into the tower as the entrance has been gated. I can only imagine what the view from the top of this tower would be like.
I never got the opportunity to see Camp Columbia while it was still in tact, and it was disappointing to walk into this cottage and find the beds stacked up in the bathroom, the floors stripped, and very little of the building's original presence still existed. This set of windows was the only thing in this cottage that caught my eye and I took the time to not only shoot it in digital, but also in medium format 120 film and 35mm film.
The side room of the bath house had shelves on the back wall, all labeled with white tape though the writing had faded long ago so it was hard to tell what was once stored there. We had a perfect day however and the lighting in the bath house was beautiful.
The bath house at Camp Columbia had certainly seen better days and I had a feeling that this room had been set up for a shot by another photographer, but I will never know for sure. It didn't matter. The colors, textures, and general feeling of a time gone by when Columbia students rushed in and out of this building on their way to various activities.
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."