I’ve featured photographs from this long abandoned apartment complex before. Situated up in the mountains, it once housed employees from a cement company, but it has stood quiet and uninhabited since the early 1980s.
The thing I find most fascinating about abandoned homes is what’s left behind. The personal items that hint at all manner of stories, along with details about what the former residents liked and did with their time. Even who they loved in some instances. Elements that this place unfortunately doesn’t really have. However, visiting again, I realised that what did interest me about it was simply the very visible passage of time. An aspect of existence that we are continually surrounded by, but rarely are we confronted with it in such a stark, wholly unsentimental way.
For over four decades then this building has stood empty, meaning no people and none of the usual day-to-day experiences it once provided, such as buying food, getting a haircut etc. So much was once contained inside these walls, meaning the decay that has occurred since its abandonment makes it even harder not to think about the intervening years. There’s personal consideration involved of course. One’s own losses and gains during that period. Experiences both good and bad. Plus, it has to be said, the inescapable future that in so many ways this structure represents. Even more prominent though are thoughts about the people who once lived here. How many are still with us? Has the time since they went elsewhere treated them well? And also, the question I have about every place like this — do the former residents ever think about the building they once called home?