If you have not seen this extraordinary book of photographs then I urge you to have a look. They are all taken in disused, dilapidated buildings or their environs. The beauty of the images comes predominantly from their stillness and the immaculate composition and lighting choices made by the photographers. Sometimes the beauty is in the detail, sometimes in the ghostly atmosphere which these spaces exude. However, sometimes it is in the contrast between how these places were used and how they have been abandoned now, between the noise and activity that must have filled them and the utter silence that now reigns as if the dust which covers everything has smothered even the echoes of past movement and sound.
The beauty is often also accompanied by a sense of wonder. A specific period is evoked by the detail or the sense of scale in some of the factory spaces creates a feeling of awe. All the images confirm what I have always felt since first taking a seminal photograph of a piece of plastic caught in barbed wire in a windy day which, when explored in the darkroom later, turned out to express the perfect form of a graceful woman in a posture that suggested she had been crucified on the wire. It sounds gruesome but, in fact, it is a beautiful, timeless image that was entirely fortuitous in the sense that it was unforeseen at the moment of taking, but which taught me that beauty can be found almost anywhere if one looks hard enough and rejects the conventional ideas of what is beautiful.