GLOBAL WASTELAND STORIES
Jasmin Zheng
I travel around the world to explore ‘the wastelands’, those dusty buildings abandoned in the modern city. Hidden in the clusters of flashy skyscrapers and forgotten by reality, these ‘wastelands’ are icons of their times. The creaking floor and dates from the last century on the calendar are proof of their age.
These places may once have been boisterous and glorious, but have since failed to catch up with the rapid pace of the rest of the city, and become ghost giants. As Susan Sontag writes in On Photography: ‘to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.’ Each broken beer bottle, each wooden door covered with cobwebs, and each abandoned newspaper has its own story, waiting to be collected and resurrected.
We have no ability to travel back in time. But in the debris left by the past, we can find stories. Through recording these, we are then able to preserve these slices of an alternate reality, maintaining those ‘wastelands’ as miniatures of their times. In this way, photography becomes a tool of historical importance, endowing places with immortality.
This article first appeared in PRISMA, Issue 2.