ABSTRACT

Comparable to abandoned places are abandoned farms, foreclosed homes, and closed schools—extensions of the direct ramifications of deindustrialization that have just as much allure due to their everyday or mundane. Entering the abandoned school, the reader/viewer encounters overexposed, blurred, and intimately close-up images. They are invited to navigate the myriad, fragmented, and fragile ways that they unfold. Places sinking into the land, or alternately, standing tall like shadowy ghosts. In theoretical sites, foundations are crumbling, driveways and yards are overgrown with weeds, and windows sit vacant like hollow eye sockets. Therefore, it can be best described as a form of study, an invented site of education where, situated as a learner, understandings about research were made retrospectively. Blurring the line between photography and painting, the photographs presented in the concession are the most abstract of the whole archive. The photograph, in turn, may be understood as a fragmented body that is undergoing sensation during an affective response.