Mandy Albania Weiner
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Stories (1/0)
Follow Your Dream
The old school at the end of the cul-de-sac had stood empty for some time. No little feet ran through the gym, no laughter echoed in the classrooms, no smell of mildewing lunches in cubbies permeated the halls. It had been years since Bellshore Public had been a working elementary school. Now the vines grew across the outside of the old brick and cinder block walls. The windows were mostly all painted shut, and the doorways were covered with plywood, and some were chained with heavy iron locks. In the playground, the old play structures had weeds and shrubs growing around them, and were rusting from lack of care. Some of the walls had been tagged by local graffiti artists, and the concrete around the rest of the yard had heaved and buckled with time and the shifting earth underneath. The school was one of those buildings that had seemed to just always be there. The neighbors couldn’t remember a time before it was built, and now that it had withered with disuse, the community mainly pretended it wasn’t there -- an eyesore, but mostly an invisible one. Except for the urban explorers. They loved the school and all the antiquated items found inside. It made a perfect subject for their photography. They had found secret ways of getting inside, and once inside they skulked about snapping shots of torn basketball nets, piles of desks, mountains of old rotting textbooks, broken cubby hooks and just about anything else they could find that looked like “urbex art”. Seth Collins was one of these young urban explorers. Just shy of 22, and still living at home with his parents, he had taken a gap year to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and while working shifts at a local photography shop, he discovered that what he loved was capturing a beautiful and original photograph.
By Mandy Albania Weiner3 years ago in Humans