15-minute read, including photo captions at bottom
Abandoneers?
Abandonauts?
Abandonographers?
IDK….I’m tryna come up with a name for “those-that-are-driven-to-seek-out-abandoned-places-in-order-to-explore-and-maybe-photograph-them”. Any ideas? Abandoniks? Abandoneros? Abandonistas (nah - that sounds like a para-military guerrilla faction).
I mean, I shoot enough abandoned places, and I meet enough wayward souls that “heed the call of the decrepit”, that I figured there should be a name for people that suffer from this ailment. A rally cry. A “we’re-all-in-this-together” and “you’re-not-alone” kind of moniker. Or whatever. You know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t.
Ok, well - Abandoneers sounds too Mickey Mouse Clubish; Abandonauts sounds too Saturday morning cartoonish; Abandoniks and Abandonistas have political undertones; Abandoneros are actually a “thing”: it’s the name for the poor (mostly kids) in the Philippines who have become gold seekers (very sad - didn’t expect to run into that when I Googled the word).
So, I guess Abandonographers is the choice - and there’s already an #abandonography hash tag on Instagram, which, it seems, seals the deal.
And so it begins….Abandonographers Unite!
On September 15th, 2018, a small group of…wait for it…Abandonographers convened in the town of Lonaconing, MD - about 2 1/2 hours NW of DC - to pay homage to a site that has gained a mythic status among, uh, Abandonographers. (Damn, I guess it’s inevitable that now I’m going to totally over-use that word).
The Lonaconing Silk Mill (aka the Klotz Silk Throwing Mill and the General Textile Mill, after the companies that formerly operated the plant) is (was?) one of the last somewhat-intact silk mills in the US. I say “was?” because the owner of the mill, Herb Crawford, died recently, and since his family has stopped allowing tours of the building, its fate is somewhat in limbo-land. The place was in a state of extreme disrepair when I visited (a fair portion of the roof had caved in, and was leaking heavily in several other areas), and although Mr. Crawford had made several attempts since he bought the mill in 1978 to secure financing to re-open the site, none of them came to fruition. Allowing historical and photography tours was one way of generating some income to at least keep the place open.
Since the completion of construction in April, 1907, the mill operated - with a waxing and waning work force - until June, 1957. At its height, the mill employed over 350 workers, but due to changing socio-economic factors (including the Great Depression and WWII), by the time it closed there were only 6 workers on the payroll. The youngest employee on record was 7 years old, and there were likely many children of varying ages working there over the years. When it finally shuttered, nothing was removed or cleaned up, so there are still personal effects strewn about the place, and much of the machinery is exactly where it was at closing.
In 2007, the George’s Creek Watershed Association nominated the mill for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but I believe that our group may have been the last -or at least one of the last - to visit the place.
For an Abandonographer, this site is/was pure gold-spun Nirvana. Or maybe silk-spun Nirvana.
It was dark, dank, dirty, gritty, grimy, grungy and just generally super-utter-nasty in every way imaginable. It smelled awful, and many parts of the flooring were so buckled and mold-covered that you had to walk like you were on ice. There was standing water in several spots, and just touching anything guaranteed instant tetanus.
I was in awe of the place.
Except when some drops of water dripped down the back of my shirt while I was in the basement.
Then I just wanted to jump straight into a detox-shower since I imagined a complex brew of asbestos, lead, and a dozen other toxic chemicals seeping through the floors and into the pores of my skin and morphing my DNA into some horrible crab-clawed super-monster that must consume human brains to survive.
Yeah, the place as spooky as HELL. WAY spookier than the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, now that I think about it. If there are ghosts anywhere, this is where they’d be hangin’. Not literally. Well, who knows, maybe literally.
In fact, I couldn’t help remarking to myself several times that this would have been the perfect set for a horror movie. You know, the kind where a gang of drunken high-schoolers dare each other to hold a seance at midnight in the basement and end up awakening a bevy of hell-spawn that hunt them down one by one, graphically gutting and hanging them from hooks on the wall. Yah. Ok. Meanwhile, back at the Asylum….
This event - running in two “shifts” (day and night) and incorporating a light-painting tutorial in the evening - was led by Don Rosenberger (of the Fairfax (& DC Metro Area) Photography Meetup), who also led the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum tour in April, 2019.
Don gave a free lecture in January, 2020 entitled “Rust and Ruins” where he introduced the concept of neuroaesthetics, which goes a long way to explaining the attraction of Abandonographers to “broken places” (which, let’s face it, are usually “broken” due to being abandoned):
There is a body of research within the fields of neuroaesthetics and neuroanatomy that deals with the way we process visual information. To simplify, our vision works on the tonal changes and edges, and our visual cortex initially produces basic geometric shapes and then overlays the interpretation. Furthermore, we "like" tension, especially light vs. dark, color vs. B&W, etc.
When you consider "decrepitude", the subjects are often characterized by strong geometric shapes and distinct lines (headlights, door edges, prison bars, rows of equipment, etc), textures (lots of transitional tonal ranges), and areas of contrasting light.
So, we like abandoned places because they’re full of awesome shapes and textures that satisfy the inherent pattern-recognition algorithms hard-wired into our visual cortices (yeah, I had to look that one up since “cortexes” got the red underline of the spellchecker). Makes total sense to me - in fact, it’s the first explanation that really seems to have nailed it. And it sounds so freakin’ cool when you say “neuroaesthetics” out loud. That is some serious PhD-level lingo right there - makes you smarter just thinking about it.
I took the time to quote Don’s lecture from my notes, not just to take you down a science-y rabbit hole, but as a segway into what will characterize many of the photos you’ll see in this set. Besides the fact that you feel like you’re stepping into a time-capsule, one of the main attractions of this site is the row-upon-row of symmetrically-placed machinery that dwindles off into a distant vanishing point. In short, this place was full of “distinct lines”, “textures”, and “areas of contrasting light” that makes your visual cortex do the Ed Grimely dance (Martin Short character):
There are many more images in the Gallery for this post so don’t forget to check that out to get the full view of the Lonaconing Silk Mill.
Here’s a short “atmospheric” video to give you a feel for what it’s like walking around inside the mill, something you may not get from the stills alone:
Like last week’s post, many of these images have been heavily processed, so in a few relevant cases, I will share the before-and-after screenshots with some thoughts about the process and reasoning behind my editing choices.
As always, thanks for reading my blog posts! Check out the Gallery for more shots!
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