"The things we taught them," photograph by Michael Murray.
"A certain kind of emptiness," photograph by Michael Murray.
A scene from an abandoned childrenswear manufacturing company is shown in this photograph by Michael M
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Self-portrait by Michael Murray.
A textbook lay open on a school desk, as if its owner had just gotten up to sharpen a pencil.
But he never came back.
Its pages now are brittle and yellowed. The metal legs on the desk are rusting. And the hardwood floor that once smelled of linseed oil and felt the footsteps of hundreds of students, is littered with the quiet debris of things crumbling.
Matthew Murray feels a kinship with forgotten places. He senses the spirit of what once was and respects the inevitability of what is.
He can't explain fully the magnetic pull he feels, so he chooses to express it in pictures.
"AbandonedAmerica.org," is the name of his exhibit opening this weekend at Mulberry Art Studios. It's also the name of his Web site.
Murray spends much of his income and even more of his free time exploring abandoned buildings. His Web site is filled with images like the one described above, taken at Juanita de Brogas Magnet Middle School.
But there are others. So many others.
Asylums, homes, hospitals, factories, barns, jails, even military facilities.
"I tend to be drawn to the places that I photograph because of the sort of philosophical questions they pose," says Murray, a Hummelstown resident. "Typically people see these places as dark and dreary and depressing, but there's also a peace about them, a beauty."
Murray says he's been dreaming about abandoned buildings since he was a kid, but it wasn't until he was an adult that he first photographed one.
Although he graduated from Temple University with a degree in film, Murray ended up working in the mental health field.
The facility that employed him also had employees who used to work at the Philadelphia State Hospital, which had since been abandoned. Murray began to hear stories, so he decided to do some research.
Finally he went to see the place for himself.
"It was an amazing experience," he says. "It's something you could never translate. It had miles of underground tunnels. It was so opposite of what normal life is like that you can't really describe it to people. So I thought I'd better get pictures to explain. People look at you funny when you say you like to go to old asylums."
Those pictures didn't turn out quite as well as he hoped. But the experience started an obsession. And over the years Murray has developed techniques in digital photography to convey the emotion and connection he feels when visiting a forgotten place.
In the last two years, he began to add words to the images.
"I've always written," he says. "I think that maybe two or three years ago I realized that maybe they were meant to go together."
His words add dimension to the stark photographs:
"there are so many reasons to stay dead.
there's the comfort of the stillness, the
way the glacial hopelessness begins to seem so safe
after so long, so long.
there's the peacefulness of inevitable collapse,
the way each fragment and echo becomes magnified, amplified,
and imbued with the deepest shades of meaning and symbolism.
there's the way that closing your eyes blinds you to
all the things that you'd rather not see."
People who know his attraction to old buildings often ask if he's ever run across an apparition or an entity in his explorations.
"Have I ever seen a ghost?" he asks. "No, I haven't. But yes I have. The ghosts are all the things that are left behind. A place takes on the energy that shapes it. People build a place for a purpose. Everything they do has their mark on it. That is to me where the ghosts are, in the echoes of the stuff that's left behind."
Although he has traveled hundreds of miles to visit old asylums and factories, Murray will also make a long trek just to explore a family home.
"There's something heart-wrenching about that," he says. "To see things people have made part of their hearts and homes just discarded. It poses an unsettling question about all the things that we do, the sort of transient nature of our own life.
"But by the same token, I don't believe these places are all sort of doom and gloom. There is a sorrow, but there is also a sort of redemption. Nature reclaims the buildings. The people are gone, but pieces of their lives are still there."
Murray's self-admitted obsession can become intensely consuming. He has learned to occasionally let it go.
"You leave and all of a sudden you can get a shower and get the grime off you, you can sit on the couch and watch TV, you can call a friend. Re-entering the normal world just helps me not take those things for granted."
"The ultimate question that makes these things so big is "What's the point?'," he says.
"Everything falls apart. Everything you work for is going to leave.
"But there's another side to that, the other way to look at it is to see how fleeting and fragile and precious life really is."
THAT'S THE TICKET
Matthew Murray:
"abandonedamerica.org: the
collapsing world around us"
Artist receptions, Fri. 5-8 p.m.
and Sun. 1-4 p.m. Cont. through Aug.
Mon.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Or by appt.
Free. Mulberry Art Studios
21 N. Mulberry St., 295-1949
www.mulberryartstudios.com
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