Urbex and Ghost Towns

Since I wrote the article about abandoned mining sites ( here is the italian version) I’ve found myself more and more involved on what many blogs call “urbex” or “urban exploration”.
People intend this practice in many different ways, taking pictures from roofs (rooftopping) is probably the most spectacular way of combining urban unusual points of view exploring and sport, but what I feel like while exploring is
more near to what is called “taking a dead urban place to new life”, I like abandoned sites and ruins and what they can tell you about their hidden past.
This is one of the most important parts of the game, the historical part, the industrial archeology.
Here is a beautiful documentary, about online communities who enjoy urban exploration practices all around the world, done in 2011, last week it became one of my personal favorite documentaries, stating that exploring the city is like hacking our environment, so situationist as a concept:


This is what an explorer is to me, a pearl hunter.
Industrial abandoned places, the more suddenly they have been abandoned, the more they can tell you about what their lost life was like.
Let me tell you about some online communities I’ve been able to find which organize and gather explorers from around the world: Talkurbex has a forum, very full of users, brings on a lot of activities and publishes images connected to their locations, it has its rules also, as long as an editorial team, and some very juicy photo tutorials.

This is a contributor of the talkurbex forum who raised up to my attention because of his work about Pripyat/Chernobyl

As I said before, places that have been abandoned suddenly often hold a certain kind of magic, the signals of an alive past, something similar to the inspirational idea of Stalker, the film by Tarkowskij.
That’s the main reason why I find the Pripyat ghost town so faschinating, like the amusement park’s pictures, so alive… the park had to be opened the day after the Chernobyl tragedy.
On talkurbex there is a “for sale” forum in which you can exchange many materials with other forum users, please read the guidelines and the policy to understand how it works.
To sell urbex photos online, as mentioned on my last post Photodune is the right place, see this abandoned basketball gymn in Pripyat/Chernobyl and taste how it feels:

It’s part of a bigger reportage, from this author, who seem to me a really good photographer enough brave to catch this pictures in the ghost town of Pripyat.

Internet is full of documents and a lot of documentaries have been created about the fearfull location of Chernobyl on which the video game authors of “Stalker, Shadow of Chernobyl” have set their last work.

I love ghost towns, and as a final suggestion I did really enjoy this reportage about Ordos, China, the biggest ghost town in the world probably, with a beautiful story to tell.

PS:
In italy we have a community that shares images and location of ghost towns all around the country, it’s called “Paesi Fatasma” and the community that’s growning around them is reachable on this facebook page.

Title image is by shokoshock.