The natural evolution of the built environment necessarily leaves some aspects of itself in the shadows. Forgotten places of worship rest amongst these, yet unlike the derelict factories and office buildings which have become synonymous with urban life in the rustbelt cities of America, they offer a particularly unique aesthetic.
The church pictured here (Church of the Transfiguration) rests amidst a poor residential neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, and has become for those surrounding it a symbol of the societal and economic decay in their once booming city. Using an ultra-wide angle lens to capture the interior space of the church, although showing more in an individual frame, allows a greater sense of intimacy as ones line of sight is curved in a very particular manner.
As a hobby urban archeologist and photographer, it is my goal to reveal to an urban populace who live, work and pray beside forgotten places what is seemingly unapparent, or at least overlooked by a traditional sense of history.
Some may view my work as subversive or even ‘guerilla’ photography, and yet for myself, it serves the threefold function of Truth by apophasis, Beauty by glorification, and Resurrection in the hope of revitalization. T.S. Eliot, in his Wasteland, sought sense in a vast senselessness, and in the contemporary plight of forgotten America, one often has to go beyond the boarding in order to reveal its crumbling, yet glorious face.