8-22-07

Welcome to Shadows and Rust.  We’ve been up for a while so I figured it was time I added some words to the front page.  This site is about exploration and preservation.  It is about curiosity and history.  And if I’m lucky it is about art.

I don’t call this an Urban Exploration site because I hate labels like that.  It implies some sort of dogma or attitude that I may or may not share.  Further more, many of the places I’ve been to are anything but urban.  So here is my motivation and mine alone.  I do not claim to speak for anyone else.

From the time I was very young - I mean like elementary school young - I was intrigued by abandoned places.  A combination of curiosity, a rebellious nature that always wanted to go where I was told not to, and a voyeuristic impulse to look in on the lives of those who once spent their days in these places. 

It is the lure of the unknown, of mystery.  That same impulse that drove Marco Polo or Lewis and Clark.  But as the wild places of the earth become fewer and farther away, that drive to explore turns inward to those places that man has already trod and left behind.  We become archeologists of the recent past, uncovering places forgotten and left to rot - or slated to be demolished in the name of commerce.

It was with great joy that I found I was not alone in this drive.  Thanks to the internet I found people all over the world driven to climb through broken windows and brave rotten floor boards for a glimpse into the past.  It was then that I started taking pictures of these vanishing and fragile places - to share with those who heed the same call - to document our shared history before it’s gone and forgotten.

Enjoy…