Photo Dump: Glendale Cemetery

Here are some more pics from my locked flickr account. These are of Glendale Cemetery in Akron, Ohio. These are from way back in August of 1999. These were all taken with black and white film, but I mistakenly scanned them in color, and this is the result. I considered it a happy accident so I left it, and did some minor fiddling with saturation levels. The differences in tone was how the scanning software interpreted the varying levels of exposure. The picture of the road snaking through the cemetery is the most interesting to me, as the grass is kind of green. I swear I had nothing to do with that. There is no color information at all in the negatives, yet there it is — green grass.

Photo Dump: A Hospital, Somewhere, or, Urban Exploration 101

Here’s how you, too, can be an urban explorer. First, find an abandoned hospital. This should be easy. Health care has changed quite a bit since the mid 20th century. Once upon a time, if one were suffering from anything from mental retardation to mental illness, there was a bed in a psychiatric hospital waiting. Huge, sprawling facilities were constructed for the care, or neglect, of those with mental problems. Despite the enormous size of these facilities, overcrowding became a problem, contributing to problems with quality of care and the quality of life for the patients. Reform, and piles of lawsuits, led to a wave of deinstitutionalization. New treatments mean that yesterday’s inpatients are today’s outpatients, the reduced number of beds reserved for those with serious disturbances. Continue readingPhoto Dump: A Hospital, Somewhere, or, Urban Exploration 101″

Photo Dump: A School, Somewhere

Because yahoo locked my flickr account and threw away the key, I’ll be posting photographs on this site on occasion. The first photo dump is an abandoned school I found while driving through rural Ohio. Unlike some other urban explorers, I would have no problem with revealing the location, except for the fact that cops are trolling the internet these days looking for pics like this that are tagged with a location or GPS coordinates in the Exif data, and then issuing arrest warrants for the photographer for trespassing. That’s pretty damned underhanded, and, in my opinion, a waste of police resources. Anyway, the pics: