Talk Urbex

This is a great month, the book we have all been waiting for is now available in book stores – you can find it in amazon here. It showcases urban exploration photos from 49 photographers around the world…

What’s the Story with Urban Exploration?
It’s easy to describe what an Urban Explorer does; they infiltrate into abandoned buildings and industrial sites and explore them, often taking photographs along the way. They don’t steal, vandalise or even leave graffiti behind them. In fact their code of honour is reminiscent of the rambler’s way: Take only pictures, leave only footprints. It is, on the other hand, not so easy to describe the whys and wherefores.

Think back to your childhood for a moment and it all begins to make sense. Do you remember the terrifying yet seductive draw of the archetypal haunted house? Every neighbourhood and every childhood has one. At the very point we cross the border from childhood into adolescence we cross real physical borders too. It’s the moment in our lives when we test the boundaries. We finally pluck up the courage to break into the haunted house and take a look around. You can probably remember your own experiences of this. And there will be at least one.

The Urban Explorer feels that we, in the comfortable and over-protected `first world’ are living in an enforced and extended state of childhood. They have remembered that they are capable of having unmediated experiences of reality and they welcome the fear that may (or may not) come with those experiences. The fear itself is the gateway to go through. It’s the gateway that leads for many to `wonderland’. This is the world through the looking glass that in some dark corner of every soul, we are all looking for.

The strange thing then is not that Urban Explorers exist; it’s that the rest of us have forgotten that we are Urban Explorers too.

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