Sunday 31 March 2013

New Polaroid Set: Abandoned Homes

A few weeks ago I came across a vast area of houses being demolished to make way for a new, controversial strip of highway to be built across Berlin. The area was fenced off but a gate was left open so I slipped in and shot a couple of films of Polaroids, a selection of which I now uploaded.

In case you're wondering at the nature of these houses, they are really 'city cottages'. They are part of a typical phenomena in German cities: stretches of land set aside for gardening where city people can rent plots to set up a cottage and tend a garden. These places tend to be miniature worlds - somewhat akin to trailer parks and year-round camping sites, where people set up for themselves their own little homes away from home, often fancifully decorated in ways that people probably would not deck out their main places of living. This is not necessarily in the best of taste - there can be found a fair abundance of garden goblins and other similar pseudo-rural kitsch used in obvious attempts to create make-believe suburban utopias in the heart of the cities. 

In this particular area the cottages are now being demolished, the buildings are empty and only the shells remain (for now). These shells have become the canvases for urban artists to leave their mark and create imaginative, if temporary, pieces of art. This I find one of those phenomena typical of urban life: creation amidst destruction.

I used a Polaroid SX-70 Sonar camera for the shoot, with Impossible Project PX 70 and PX 680 CP films.

[Click here to view]