Opacity.us

Once a building no longer serves its original intended purpose, and all of its previous functionality ceases to exist, it becomes truly fascinating. Each room is transforming into something new at its own rate, yielding to water, ice, wind and gravity as they reclaim a manufactured space. The corrosion and decay paint vibrant colors across otherwis... e dull surfaces, lit only by natural sunlight spilling into rooms at unaccustomed angles. Each object left behind becomes more significant than it has ever been, hinting at the life prior to disuse. Moldy folders full of psychiatric evaluations hold clinical analyses regarding a patient's drawings in a pitch black, flooded hospital basement. An opaque pair of square-rimmed glasses sits upon a dark control panel in the power plant's control room, left undisturbed since the 1970s. A dusty pile of papers hastily stapled together documents a patient's life at the tuberculosis hospital, from admission, to death, to autopsy, to burial. Floors collapse and walls cave in without care; if you get hurt, no one is here to help you. This is a lonesome alien world whose dark corners and peeling walls have gotten a hold of me and many others; this affinity for derelict structures, negative spaces, and often dangerous excitement is the core essence of exploring that drives me to photograph these places. The hospital that won my curiosity, in Kings Park NY . Photo © Tom Kirsch, opacity.us "Opacity" is the transparency of something; either physically, or its obscurity in meaning. Opacity.us has been created to answer - and ask - questions about these abandoned sites. Researching the history of a place, combined with the memories shared by people who worked and lived there, can often shed light on an intended purpose of the structure, what happened there, and why it closed. The photographs are the portal inside; sometimes prompting more questions rather than answering them. This mixture of fascinating history and endless curiosity inside a beautiful world of decay is the essence of ...Read More