AMERICA THE ABANDONED

No one lives here anymore.

Christmas decorations. Framed family photos. Vintage clothing. These are some of the items that are gathering dust in this affecting collection of photographs of abandoned houses. A documentarian, Sansivero photographed these places during his travels in the American Northeast, Midwest, and South. He notes that there are, shockingly, more than 15 million vacant houses in the country. Unlike much so-called ruin porn—soulless images that glamorize the blight they showcase—Sansivero’s photos bring out the humanity of the people who once occupied these buildings. As he writes in his introduction, “With each new discovery and each door that opens, I get a glimpse into the history of not only a building but also a person’s life.” There are signs of life everywhere. In a bedroom of a Maryland house are a pram and crib; a porcelain basin and pitchers sit on a nearby dresser. It’d be a scene of midcentury domestic tranquility were it not for the peeling paint, a moth-eaten lampshade, and ivy snaking its way through a window. On a dresser in Delaware County, New York, is an assortment of trinkets from long-ago journeys. Here, too, the walls are coming apart and the dust is thick. Most heartrending are children’s rooms—filled with dolls, stuffed animals, and books—and homes of the elderly, their canes and crutches and stacks of paper the last vestiges of compromised existences. Several of the houses have pianos—one can imagine the out-of-tune notes of a red, white, and blue upright made in 1976, a portrait of a military officer hanging above it, askew. Many of the structures are hidden in woods and dangerous to enter; in one of the photo captions, Sansivero says his leg went through a floor. His photographs recall the eerie images of abandoned buildings in Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear accident. But no cataclysmic disaster befell the houses in this book. Instead, what we see is the creeping decay of much of American life.

Ghostly images of vacant homes, sensitively captured.