Rusty relics

click photo to enlarge

In a recent post I was pondering the attraction of decay, and the reasons why photographers are often drawn to scenes of dilapidation and dereliction. Look at any online galleries by enthusiast photographers and you will usually find examples of this genre. Moreover, if you look carefully you will also see photographs that constitute a subset of the category, namely the abandoned vehicle. Photographers in the United States seem drawn to shooting rusting cars and trucks abandoned in rural areas, vehicles thirty, forty, fifty years old and more, that are gradually succumbing to the weather and the weeds. Such images are certainly taken by people in the U.K., but I get the feeling that they are relatively far fewer, and I have sometimes wondered why this should be.

It's probably to do with land area and the density of population. In our small, crowded islands, space is at a premium, and waste ground where it does exist, tends to be put to a fresh use quite quickly. Many farmers (though by no means all) are obsessively tidy and dispose of old vehicles fairly promptly. Then there's the scrap metal price that attaches to such things. I've always thought that these are the reasons for fewer abandoned vehicles and hence fewer photographs: the luxury of unused open space of the sort that exists in the United States simply militates against it.

This open shed, stuffed with the gleanings of decades, shows what happens to a few old vehicles: they get put to one side, collected with other odds and ends that might be useful or that could be renovated in years to come. The two old tractors and the small car tucked away at the back appear to be about sixty or so years old. Those wheels on the right look like they might be from traction engines. And the old lawn mower appears to have been stored with the intention of being repaired, and then forgotten. Whatever the reason for the collection I thought it might make an interesting photograph to pore over.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 13mm (26mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/15
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The attraction of decay

click photo to enlarge

The attractive qualities that are sometimes ascribed to ruins and scenes of dereliction and decay has its roots in the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This movement was a reaction against the dominant social and political values of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature. It elevated strong emotion and the "sublime", proclaiming them worthy feelings capable of standing alongside reason.

Today painters and photographers generally eschew the ancient classical and Gothic ruins that feature in the works of Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner, preferring the post-industrial scenes of our urban areas. Derelict buildings, graffiti, abandoned factories and dilapidated warehouses in inner-city wastelands have taken the place of the roofless churches, collapsed columns and decaying statues in arcadia or on precipitous heights. But, in finding such things attractive and worthy of recording in paint or with a camera, is there more than the late stirrings of Romanticism at work. Perhaps our latterday scenes that evoke feelings of repulsion and sublimity work at a visceral level reminding us of the transient nature of our society, and the fact that all we now value and revere has the potential to fall apart and be cast aside. For some that is a terrifying thought that undermines the contract that materialism offers us. For others it is a visual admonition of a truth that our culture tries to make us forget. And maybe that is what determines whether or not you like such images.

Today's photograph is not an example of urban decay and dereliction, but rather is its rural counterpart. I don't know what the original purpose of these abandoned units was: perhaps they housed pigs or some other livestock. But today they sit empty and forlorn at Monksthorpe in Lincolnshire, their asbestos panels slowly succumbing to the ravages of the wind, weeds growing up around them, a glimpse of someone's failed or superseded enterprise. As I walked past them one evening, the sun low in the sky, its light illuminating the underside of a bank of low, dark clouds, the buildings' abandoned character appealed to me, and I took this photograph.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 8.8mm (41mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.66 EV
Image Stabilisation: On