| I
had first encountered
a derelict building
at the age of six
on a pre-war family
holiday in Ireland.
It was a ruined cottage
high in the Mountains
of Mourne, a simple
structure deserted
many years before,
open to the sky,
with grass for a
floor and with only
the walls remaining.
I walked inside over
the doorless threshold
and looked through
the empty window
at the sea below.
The tiny building
seemed haunted by
the nameless, forgotten
people who had once
lived and wrested
a living there. I
was fascinated.
Later, just after
the war at my first
job in London, I
would take my lunchtime
walks through the
vast bomb-site that
is now the Barbican
development, but
was then still as
the German bombers
had left it only
a few years previously.
With vistas of huge
mounds of rubble
pierced by projecting
girders, the large
empty shells of Victorian
office buildings
with the names of
their erstwhile tenants
still listed beside
the burnt-out doors,
and steep flights
of stairs rising
dramatically up to
nowhere, it was the
grand photographic
portfolio that never
was. On my salary
I could not afford
a roll of film, let
alone a camera. I
still regret the
missed opportunity.
In the years since
then I have photographed
bomb sites, demolitions,
empty shops, even
the dereliction of
cars abandoned for
scrap and of torn
posters that have
forgotten what it
was they were once
trying to say.
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