Showing posts with label decay. Show all posts

2024 Pumpkin Dump Video

Just a quick Instagram video to share from this year's Pumpkin Dump. Another successful drop at another local, abandoned house. They really do make a great backdrop!

Enjoy!

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The Mummies of Guanajuato

A few months back, I posted a video of the intro to Werner Herzog's fantastic 1979 gothic horror film, Nosferatu The Vampyre. In it were incredible clips of twisted and shadowed mummified remains, overlayed with a hauntingly beautiful score by Popul Vuh. It's still one of the most striking, and personal favorite, intros to a horror film.

As I researched the intro, I was completely awestruck by the mummified figures, assuming that they were from the famous Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy. But I was actually wrong.

I discovered the shots were actually of a collection known as the Mummies of Guanajuato, Mexico. And while they weren't as famous as their Italian counterparts, they were nonetheless just as interesting.

From my previous post:
The famous collection of mummies from Guanajuato, Mexico dated back to an 1833 cholera epidemic. The naturally mummified remains were later unearthed after the failure of living relatives to pay 'burial taxes' of the time, and were stored together in an above-ground building adjacent to the cemetery. By the 1900s, these mummies began attracting tourists and eventually the building became a permanent museum.

(Tjalgahorn has since had a great post over at the October Branches blog on a new fungal growth spotted on one of the mummies - yes, The Last Of Us, indeed! Although in all seriousness, it could lead to decomposition and eventual loss of the mummies...)

The Museo De Las Mommas De Guanajuato houses the entire collection of 111 mummies, with 59 on permanent display. And their photography of the mummies is absolutely fantastic! A perfect source for Halloween prop reference, these photos have gone into my "inspiration folder" and will definitely be used for future prop reference.

Enjoy!

The Salted Earth Series - Photos By Highbury Cemetery

Immediately after wrapping up the 2018 Halloween season, I sat down and went through the night's photos.

In one last burst of creativity, I decided to take a handful and just see how far I could filter them and ended up creating a small art project. The one thing that I had noticed about the photos from Halloween night was the amount of color in each. It was something that I had started to worry about—that is, using too many colors in my display and giving it an almost Christmas light effect. EEK!

I took the photos and went in the completely opposite direction, stripping all color out of each, adding layers of decay and grit to accentuate the bare rawness of the subjects.

The results were pretty cool, but as the post-Halloween burnout quickly settled in late last year, I ended up shelving the project. I had the series of photos done, but I never did anything with them.

Until now.

In the run-up to this October, the Halloween fire is once again starting to stoke up, so I decided to revisit the photos and finally publish them all.

The term "salted earth" came to mind as a cool name for the series, but as I thought more about it the name took on more of a double-meaning.

In the literal sense, "salting the earth" was symbolic of spreading salt to wipe out an area of a conquered enemy, rendering the land useless for crop production. Similar to removing color and life, leaving only the harshness of raw black and white lifelessness.

It also came to represent the final season of Highbury Cemetery in its old location, leaving only waste as we moved to our new home earlier this year. The land, as I joked, was rendered useless for any future haunt display.

So this name stuck. And after nearly 11 months of sitting on the shelf, I finally present my 2018 photo project, The Salted Earth Series.

01. Rise of The Undead

02. Le Cadavre de Vodoun

03. The Guardian of the Tombs

04. The Obelisk's Watchman

05. The Spectre's Shriek

St. Lawrence Cemetery - Independence, Ohio

In this edition of Cemetery Sundays, I traveled to St. Lawrence Cemetery, a fairly small and modest cemetery located in Independence, Ohio, just south of Cleveland. The modest grounds have been encroached upon on all sides by constant development, but still resist the steady creep of urbanization. When the cemetery was first established back in 1851, the area was still large swaths of farming lands.

I arrived early and made quick work of the grounds, capturing most of the ornate tombstones and markers from the late 1800s...

Upon finishing my brisk morning tour through the cemetery grounds, I decided to go explore the nearby creek. Mere steps into the small wooded area surrounding the deep creekbed, I stumbled upon an amazing old, decrepit bridge. Most of the wood planks had long since rotted away and the original iron frames were fighting off decades of advanced rust and decay. Literally thousands of people work in the nearby surrounding office buildings, yet certainly none of them know of the existence of this old structure, hidden right in front of them...

Karen Jerzyk Photography

Karen was featured on this week's episode of Haunters Hangout (which can be viewed here). Fantastic conceptual photos that seem to find organic beauty within modern industrial decay. Highly recommended viewing.

From her site:
I strive to produce photos that tell a story- that connect with the viewer on a personal level. I like to find locations that were abandoned before any sort of technological age, typically locations with relics left in them from 1980 and earlier (the older, the better). My photos are meant to be read like a book, and looked at and thought about often. There is no "right answer" to the ultimate meaning of any one of my photos, as each viewer can read the scene differently. My goal is for my photos to evoke thought and emotion.