Abandoned America

Steve Gottlieb has travelled the country looking for, as the chapters show, houses and barns, factories and equipment, vehicles, signs and facades and finally a kaleidoscope of odds and ends. Another reviewer has mentioned the color and this is what I noticed first, it is very garish and uneven and there are very few true blacks anywhere. The technical notes mention that the images have been color corrected where needed and although the plates are printed in a very fine screen (over 200 dpi I think) the lack of solid blacks give most of the photos a pastel feel and detracts from the raw grittiness of the subject.

It is also a book of unfortunate technical contrasts, page twelve shows an old wooden house surrounded by bright (color corrected?) green trees making the photo look rather artificial yet turn over the page and there is a stunning black and white (using the four color black printing process) photo of three abandoned houses with a dead tree in the middle of the composition. Page 136 shows a deserted amusement park with very washed out color, over the page a super image of an abandoned hospital in New York with Manhattan in the background looking just like someone has made a collage of various skyscrapers and created a city skyline.

It is the uneven color that spoils the book for me. I have some books that cover the (almost) same subject better and they are in black and white, this seems much more appropriate for this material, Meadowlands by Ray Mortenson, covering the industrial landscape of New Jersey, The Hand of Man on America by David Plowden and Dead Tech with photos by Manfred Hamm. This is a quite extraordinary book of photos (and text) of abandoned technology in Europe and America. For very controlled color work have a look at The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston and Written in the West by film director Wim Wenders, photos of abandoned bric-a-brac from southewest USA.