Each city has its ghost town and it is particularly noticeable these days how many derelict buildings and empty shops there are. These are haunted places; metaphors of loss and abandonment. They are suffused with a disturbed sense of self, what Freud referred to as the unheimliche: something familiar which has become alienated through the process of repression. They are also analogous to a fragile sense of self. My photographs of ransacked rooms, graffitied walls, scattered detritus, peeling paint, bare brick, boarded exteriors, crumbling interiors and liver-spotted walls can all be read as inner disturbances – an internal landscape reflected in the abandoned urban environment. When entering these places we stand at the threshold where the self is exposed and begins to dissolve. There is a realisation that these abandoned structures are awaiting demolition, on the verge of a seismic upheaval and imminent collapse.www.flickr.com/photos/51241173@N03
