I don't really do a whole lot of photography. It is part of my job (I'm an automotive journalist), but writing is the much bigger part, and I'll go months without being assigned to take any pictures. The pictures I take also tend not to be very challenging, cars at big auto shows are all set up and lit with the intention of making life as easy as possible for photographers, and I honestly do all of my shooting at those events in auto mode. So my hobby of urban exploration is really the only time that I get to be creative with my photos. But at this point, a lot of those were starting to all look the same, and I wanted to try something new.
So one day I was looking at some old photos from the South Bronx in the 70s. Really bleak black and white shots of whole blocks of apartment buildings sitting empty and big fields of rubble from buildings that were razed but never cleaned up. It was amazing to me that an area of the biggest city in America could be so empty. Feeling inspired, my urbex partner and I went down the hill into East Cleveland, an area of the city where one in five buildings is abandoned. We have a lot more trees here than were in those photos from the Bronx, which keeps them from being quite so bleak, but it was still a strange experience to drive down streets where not one single building was inhabited, right in the middle of the city.
