The Fascination of Dereliction

Steve Shapiro wrote.

I love the interpretative look of a 'homey' setting that was devistated.
Kind of softens the destruction and softens the heart felt dismay of such devistation.

It reminds me of those English etchings that were illustrations in books I had as a child just after WWII.

Steve Shapiro

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The Fascination of Dereliction.

As an eight year old boy, having grown to that age inspite of having some of my surroundings bombed into ruins during the blitz of WW 2, in London, I can understand the sentiment in Steve's posting, above. For several years, following the war, we kids played on the bombed sites without the memories of dead people being dragged out of the ruins because our parents were able to distract us from these memories. Some older kids did have more gruesome pictures in their minds. None of what was going on, or why, made any sense. We just made the most of what advantages it gave us.....somewhere to play and discover hidden caves, craters and dangerous precipices. Much of the dereliction, of course, was recorded both in stills and movies but none of this imagery was manipulated by HDR, or anything like it. As I came from an ''artistic'' family I was painting abstracts in the early fifties and much of my work, in retrospect, came from my submerged mental images of the destruction I had seen, several years earlier as a child. Many other artist have used this subject.

Dan's manipulated images show us more of what happened after the flood ( evidence of looting?) if you study the detail. There is an issue to ponder which emphasizes the difference between destruction and devastation caused by the forces of Nature and that caused by the hatred of Man. I felt I was becoming nauscious on viewing these digital images mainly because I think Dan's expert manipulation highlighted the situations to a point of extreme awareness.

Thanks Dan ! ! I will recover, soon.

John Grocott- Photographist- London

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Received on Sun Apr 23 08:07:01 2006