Old crap

Last week I visited with a few fellow members of the Old Crap Society (Oude Meuk Genootschap – OMG) several locations in and around Berlin, including the Heilstätten Beelitz, the Bärenquell Brauerei, a depot of Berlin Wall elements, Chemiewerk Rükana Rüdersdorf and finally Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf – places that have been able to escape from the wrecking balls but not really to stand the test of time. Besides six memorable evenings full of sausage and beer, good company and conversation, it gave us an adventurous dip in the phenomenon of ‘Urban Exploration’ (also referred to as ‘urbex’) – a sport that comes to the core of us as OMG.

What makes urbex to such a fun? Well, in the first place it is a kind of adventure that appeals to the boy in us as it stimulates imagination beyond any belief: the excitement of penetrating into decayed buildings, where the ghosts of the past have entered into a secret pact with the strong arm of security services that could emerge behind every corner. Feeling the hunger of the hunter – hunting for images in this case. The sound of splintering glass, the danger of falling through the rotten floor, the cold wind that bleaks through the open windows into the abandoned corridor; the distant stumbling of people living on the edge of society fiddling with paintbrushes or old metals, possibly preparing a can of beans over a fire of scrap wood.

In terms of photography – urbex is in the end a branch of photography – the job seems to be simple: making images of old crap. But to make images that are as exciting as the experience of making them is not as easy as it may sound. That excitement is almost impossible to be captured into the frame of an image, as becomes clear in post-processing. It turns out that the actual deal is to superimpose an emotion or idea of your own that is independent of place and time, that is more enduring and convincing than the fascination for decay and destruction. To transcend from transient matter, on the wings of your imagination, the desire to find the endlessness in the perishable.

The images that want to survive the remorseless selection must express the beauty of melancholy, accentuating mortality – but also as sacrifice, as stairs to a higher state of being, as windows to new life – all emphasized by the colors of autumn and the humid grayness outside that both emboss and accelerate the transformation. The desolation in the moment of death is further emphasized by faint signs of human life, like rags of lace, the skeleton of a chair, the signature of a graffitist, the shadow of an occasional visitor (or: the photographer himself?). But foremost by the sheds of light – that are nowhere else as pure, soft and essential as here, where there is barely anything of value left. To see the light in darkness, in conversion – to capture the mystical moment, I see that as the real challenge secluded in urbex photography.