2025
Forgotten Places
Forgotten Places explores questions about the relationship between abandonment, value, and perception.
This work was shot in an abandoned Victorian home and styled with my collection of antique clothing. The impetus for the project was my own experience with a practice known within the subculture of antique and vintage dealing as “picking bandos”. While most folks within the subculture of vintage and antique dealing opt for more conventional methods of sourcing goods, such as thrifting or scouring estate sales, there is a sub-subculture of people who find their goods from abandoned houses. Putting questions of legality aside, I am curious whether abandonment inherently disregards the value of an object or place? If so, what does it mean to steal an object that has been abandoned? Further, does perception determine value in places and objects? Is the manipulation of value really just the manipulation of perception? Most of all I am interested in what happens to the value of a forgotten object or place when it is remembered?
The project, Forgotten Places, explores these questions.
Rambling down another lonely road, my eyes strain looking for structure beyond the screen of trees– forgotten places long since faded into the landscape. Camouflaged by time and tree branches reaching out like fractal figurines in postures of praise rejoicing in their solitude. The forgotten places are easy to miss and they like it this way. After hours of rocks kicking up at the belly of the truck, I find a forgotten place with no door welcoming me inside. Floorboards creak with uncertainty and dust dances in ribbons of sunlight coming through windows half boarded up. What’s left of the wallpaper hangs on in patches of stubborn pride. Unfounded trust in the stairs carries me up and into a splendidly dull room. Decay written on the walls curls like smoke up into a favorite corner. Dried grass peeks out from the upholstery of a Victorian sofa, whispering this room was once the upstairs parlor. Gatherings and guests once entertained here have been forgotten with generations, but perhaps the room remembers.
And, if it does?
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