Many of us see it every day. We call it many things: Urban blight, sprawl, the ‘rust’ belt. We hunch our shoulders, turn up the collar on our parka and quicken our pace down the sidewalk, staring at the ground.

Not the urban explorer: to them, the abandoned are things of beauty and fascination.  Urban exploration is the act of exploring areas of the urban environment that you might not normally notice or care about.  More specifically -and this is where things get interesting, exploring areas that nobody seems to have noticed or cared about for quite some time.  Abandoned buildings of all sorts, tunnels, rooftops, old transit stations, the site of a former Nike missile installation.  These are all targets for urban exploration enthusiasts.

Generally, those persons involved in these activities make it a point to leave things exactly as they found them, taking nothing with them but pictures when they leave. The images that people come back with might be considered mundane, but that’s almost the point: you are seeing things that most people would never bother to go out of their way to see.  Relics of a forgotten time that seem as irrelevant and distant from our own existence as the pyramids.  Urban explorers find beauty and excitement in the most unexpected of all places.

The questions that are raised by taking these abandoned, desolate and dirty structures and elevating them into something worthy of examination are sobering.  How far down the road to an entirely disposable culture must we be when buildings that are only a few years old have become cast off relics?  The images almost beg us to reconsider: should urban desolation be so ubiquitous as to be invisible to us?  Should it really take a photograph to open our eyes to a thing in plain sight?

The duality of the activity is fascinating: it seems to elevate our human accomplishments, taking interest in feats of engineering or architectural beauty and yet it is sobering to see how quickly creation reclaims man’s castoff playthings.

Perhaps urban exploration holds a fascination for some simply because it is forbidden fruit. (Urban exploration is also called ‘infiltration’) Maybe those who examine the castoffs of urban life are simply in it for the thrills.  Whatever the reason, when we walk by that rusty old water tower on our way to work for the dozenth time this month, if we feel drawn to pause for a moment, relax our shoulders and turn our gaze away from the sidewalk, maybe we can begin to appreciate our surroundings through the eyes of the explorer.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting some further images and resources associated with urban exploration, so stay tuned.