Desolate Places » The Photographs of Michael Bowman

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Desolate Places: Michael Bowman

A great photograph shows the world as it is, not how it should be.

An artist’s expression is a culmination of all the experiences of their lives. The good. The bad. The ugly. The beautiful. It all gets absorbed into the brain and mashed together. The experiences are broken down to their basic levels, sometimes to such fundamental things as light and dark, and are reconstituted and reformulated. Later, these basic principles and formative experiences are found reflected in the real world and presented as they are in testament to those experiences, or the real world is manipulated to reflect the artist’s vision. Either way, that vision is a product of all the experiences of that artist’s life. For better or worse.

I will not go into the details of the experiences that have produced my vision. Suffice to say they have been good and bad, light and dark. They have produced a view of the world that is mine alone. It appeals to some. Repulses others.

I find beauty in things that others overlook or ignore. Places and people that have been abandoned, neglected or forgotten.

welcome mat

June 23, 2010 Posted in Urbex

welcome mat, originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

Xray

June 14, 2010 Posted in Urbex

Xray, originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

Out of the dark. Abandoned (disused) hospital, with power.

According to the caretaker of this place, it’s haunted. Supposedly there was an explosion in the boiler room many years ago that resulted in one worker’s fatality. Since then the security guards claim to see the body of the worker, sometimes they see the bottom half, sometimes the top – the man having been blown in two by the boiler explosion.

twisted

May 7, 2010 Posted in Urbex

twisted, originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

unstoppable

April 26, 2010 Posted in Urbex

unstoppable, originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

orphan

April 20, 2010 Posted in Urbex

orphan, originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

It’s such a cliche’. The chair left behind in the abandoned building. You seem to always find them in the perfect light, casting shadows and oddly out of place (yet in place) if that makes sense. Did a photographer put it there to catch the light…or did some unknown person leave it there because it was such a great place to put your feet up and ponder?

s. lander st.

April 19, 2010 Posted in Urbex

s. lander st., originally uploaded by Desolate Places.

Newcomer

The young man showed up in Newburgh and was dead before most people even knew his name. The police had never run into him. On the street, where word travels as fast as Nextel blips, people just said a Jamaican boy got killed over at a weed house. He was 22 years old and named Orlando Grant, they learned later.

Newburgh can be tight as family. Longtime East Enders can name seemingly every person on the river side of Lutheran Street. The exception is the newcomers, often immigrants. Some follow family into the city and stay; some pass through for a bit on their way to somewhere else. Grant had come legally from Jamaica just a few months before police found him shot to death in a Lander Street basement. It was an empty building – a couple mattresses upstairs, steel grates on the windows and a reinforced door. Grant was dead before people in the neighborhood noticed he was even there. (Text taken from the Times Herald Record, Special Report on Newburgh Homicides – 15 Since Jan 1 2008).