About Brett
How it started
I spent 15 years as a fitter and turner working inside power stations, factories, and industrial facilities. I knew these buildings from the inside — how they functioned, what they felt like when they were running. When I started photographing the abandoned versions of the same places, I wasn't documenting decay. I was reading a language I already knew.
The first location I photographed was White Bay Power Station — a decommissioned coal plant on the edge of Sydney Harbour, closed for 30 years, still largely intact. Capture Magazine ran the photographs shortly after and wrote: "Brett Patman may well be the luckiest person in Sydney. With a $2 billion transformation in the works, the historical value of this series is only set to grow."
That piece became Lost Collective.
The project
Over the past decade, the archive has expanded to include hospitals, hotels, farmsteads, cement works, and Japan's haikyo — the abandoned resort towns and onsen hotels left behind when the bubble economy collapsed in the 1990s. 62 series. Over 1,800 prints. Two countries. Every photograph made inside a building that had been emptied of everything except its architecture and its past.
The buildings are not ruins. Most are structurally intact. What they've lost is purpose — and with it, the people who gave them meaning. That gap between what a place was and what it is now is where the photographs live.
The response
What I didn't expect was the community. Former workers who recognised their old workplaces. Families who had lived in the houses. Nurses who trained in the hospitals. People reached out to say: I was there. I remember that room. My father worked that floor for 30 years.
The photographs became a way for people to reconnect with places they thought were already gone — not because the buildings had been demolished, but because access had closed and the world had moved on.
Recognition
Lost Collective received a Highly Commended in the Multimedia category at the 2016 National Trust Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards — recognised alongside organisations dedicated to preserving Australia's built and cultural heritage.
The work has been featured by The Guardian, Vice, ABC Radio National, 7News Sydney, the Sydney Morning Herald, Broadsheet, Capture Magazine, and Nikon.
"The scene is bleak and haunting for photographer Brett Patman, whose new project aims to capture historical abandoned buildings before they're gone." — Vice
"Lost Collective: Photographing the Ghosts of Sydney's Industrial Past." — The Guardian
The prints
Every print is produced from the original RAW file on museum-grade materials and signed by hand. Limited editions from 100 down to 25. Once an edition sells out, it is never reproduced.