Broadsheet invited me to write a personal essay early in 2016, in the form of a first-person piece about what pulls me back to abandoned buildings in the first place. The essay ran under the title Why I Take Photos in Abandoned Buildings.
The thing that has not changed in the years since is the response to the photographs themselves. Not the likes or the share counts. The first-hand reactions from people who knew the places: who worked there, who grew up in the surrounding town, who watched their parent leave a job they'd held for thirty years when the building shut.
A handful of people met through this work have shifted what Lost Collective is. The most memorable, for me, is a man named John, a 94-year-old engineer who saw my photographs of White Bay Power Station in the Sydney Morning Herald and called me on my drive home from work. He founded an engineering company that had a hand in building most of the power stations in Australia. His memory is starting to go, which is why he wrote the book pictured below.
An excerpt from the Broadsheet essay:
"I've worked as a fitter and turner for the past 15 years, then as a mechanical service technician, servicing all kinds of different customer sites to install, maintain and repair equipment. Places like water-treatment plants, mines, refineries, foundries, laboratories, food manufacturers, cigarette factories, crematoriums, power stations, the list goes on. I always thought the buildings that made up these industries were interesting. It's what's left behind when these industries become redundant that is often most interesting."
Read the full essay (archived) at broadsheet.com.au (Wayback).
