I have been photographing abandoned homes and buildings in Maine, upstate New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Driving countless miles and constantly scanning my surroundings I searched for crumbling interior spaces and attempted to gain access to make photographs. My adrenalin would increase as I approached the overgrown structures looking for a point of entry. I began to recognize the familiar smells of places no longer inhabited. There was a thrill to climbing through tangled weeds and rotting doorways to set up my tripod and take long exposures of walls, windows, doorways and personal fragments of lives left behind. There were no artificial lights and the color of the available light was filtered by foliage and branches growing into the rooms through broken window panes. No two places were alike but what they had in common was a presence of a life or lives once lived there. Often there was a sense of the day to day activities and sounds that had filled the rooms.

Was I drawn to this project because my three children had recently left our home to pursue their own lives and had left me with an empty nest? The significance of this connection was not conscious but it is hard to ignore. My belief is that most artists create work that is autobiographical to some extent. Beyond the personal meaning I am struck by the changes occurring in American communities as older homes and farms are demolished and replaced by structures often lacking in personality. There is little elegance in this architecture surrounded by stripped and barren landscapes.

Kev Filmore