I missed this one when it ran. I knew the SMH feature was being worked on, but I didn't see the published article on the SMH website until someone sent it through later, somewhere around April 2016.
The framing in the piece, that I had "been quietly letting himself into deserted buildings and institutions", glosses over how access actually works. The reality is more complicated and varies by site: in some cases formal heritage-access permission, in some cases the owner walking me through, in some cases an arrangement with a contractor. How I get into a building depends on the building. I'm not going to lay all of that out here.
By the time the article landed, I had a stack of Japanese material building up from the April trip to Yubari and other regional sites in Hokkaido. The next year of Lost Collective shifted toward documenting communities outside Australia where industrial change had already played all the way through.
"Brett Patman's photographs of abandoned building interiors evoke a strong sensory response: one can almost hear the paint flakes crackling underfoot and breathe the stale air. Over the past five years he's been quietly letting himself into deserted buildings and institutions and photographing their dark, haunting interiors, heavy with the echoes of activity but bereft of life. It was working as a mechanical technician in places like factories, power stations and foundries that piqued Patman's interest in documenting the architecture of decay. He began exploring beyond the barricades of tumbledown structures and time and time again discovered narratives of past eras. So began Patman's one-man photography project, the Lost Collective."
Read the original SMH piece at smh.com.au.
