in many ways i do not feel this site is about me. clearly i am responsible for the photography and
editing, the original writing and the selection of the quotes. there is a reason that you will find my
name and/or picture on very few of the pages. it isn't simply to protect my anonymity, it's also
because of what i feel this site should be. abandoned buildings are kind of like a rorschach test -
everyone sees different things in them, and while i have my own interpretations i would rather
remain a cipher and allow you to decide how you wish to experience and absorb the material i
have put forth. part of what makes a derelict building interesting is that there are so many
questions about it that will never be answered, and to shine a floodlight into the mysteries and
shadows removes what makes the unknown intriguing and magical. i would rather you draw your
own conclusions and find out about the strange and magnificent places that i have visited in
fragments and echoes as i have, and perhaps come to understand that what i am is a collage of
these whispers and memories and not something quantifiable in the boring statistics of everyday
life.

having said that, i suppose there is an understandable amount of interest in how someone would
come to do the things i do, and why. for as long as i can remember, i have dreamed about
abandoned buildings - grand and shattered husks that dwarf in scale and grandeur anything
possible in this plane. as a child i went in an abandoned house or two but never with much
purpose. when i graduated from college, i entered the mental health field working overnight on a
locked inpatient ward at a private psychiatric facility. since i had gone to school for a completely
unrelated subject (film), i started to read about the history of mental health care and was
enthralled. far more dark and twisted than any work of fiction, the story of the treatment of mental
illness is full of pathos, pain, redemption, thwarted hopes and ambitions - all on such a grand scale
as to make even Shakespeare's greatest tragedies seem trifling. mental illness is perhaps (next to
death itself) the most massive and frightening unsolved mystery that has ever confronted mankind,
and addressing it has been done through nearly every academic discipline - the arts, philosophy,
theology, sociology, chemistry, science and medicine, and on and on. my attention became more
and more focused on one nearby institution, philadelphia state hospital (or byberry). a number of
staff and patients that i worked with had been there, and byberry had a well-earned reputation as
one of the most terrible places among an institutional system littered with terrible places. i am not
superstitious but if i were i would describe the place as cursed from the beginning: the first patients
at byberry were survivors of the blockley institution fire, where a large percentage of the
population were burned alive because they were shackled to the walls. through the years the
inmates at philadelphia state hospital fared little better - the abuse and neglect were
well-documented yet still unimaginable, and a series of exposés featuring the unfortunates locked
inside in squalid conditions and looking only marginally better than concentration camp survivors
helped spark an ambitious but short-lived overhaul of the system. byberry had been abandoned
for a decade by the time i started looking into it and was already legendary in the then relatively
new urban exploration scene. the more i learned, the more i knew i had to go, and at last i did.

as those who spend the majority of their spare time and money chasing abandoned sites know,
there is very little that can adequately describe the first experience where one is completely
overwhelmed by a site. byberry had over 40 buildings on more than 160 overgrown acres,
connected by miles of underground tunnels and all in varying states of decay. i would say that at
that point something within me awakened, as though for years i had been preparing myself for a
moment that had finally come. i had finally found a way off the map, a place where all the stifling
constraints of a world that revolved around things i found insignificant and empty were washed
away. it was humbling, to be swallowed up in a crumbling maze of rooms and corridors that no
longer led anywhere, by a site that was as indifferent to those inside it as it was to the passing cars
and meaningless bustle of the world that had left it behind. there was something timeless and
immortal there, but no matter how hard i tried it was absolutely impossible to convey what it was i
experienced to anyone else who hadn't witnessed it firsthand. as i realized that this was only the
first of many such places, i started visiting more and soon the obsession had completely
enveloped me like the perfect darkness in the underground tunnels connecting byberry's buildings.
whatever i was before is without substance or reality to me now, and what i currently am has
been permanently and inextricably tied to the experiences i have had in that place.

people look at you oddly when you try to explain how beautiful an abandoned asylum can be,
and an explosion of ferns and moss in the machinery of a multistory furnace in a power plant is not
something i can simply tell you about. i started taking pictures to try to capture what it was that
captivated me and make it something i could share with others. abandoned sites are some of the
most difficult places to photograph and i tried to learn every trick i could to work around the fact
that the only lighting i have is natural, because a flash destroys what makes a scene what it is. i
continue to try to improve my processes and techniques and i hope that you enjoy the fruits of my
labor. i am lucky to have been to the places i have, and i enjoy seeing how other people react to
these points of intersection between this plane and the next. i still work in the mental health field,
though not in inpatient and not overnight, and as you can probably guess, my photography defines
my life.

byberry was torn down in 2006 to build an office park that never materialized. the pictures i took
there before that were terrible. as my equipment and skill progressed i kept telling myself byberry
would still be there and that there were more important places to visit, but the demolition plans
were so sudden they caught everybody off guard. i went up a week before they started razing it
and the campus was a circus with construction workers, security, police... and so i will never have
any pictures of it that are anywhere near good. i learned a valuable lesson, though - that
everything's span on this earth is finite, and that you may not get another chance to revisit a place
if you put it off. that is why i am out taking pictures as much as i can, in hopes that in my own finite
span i might accomplish something worth remembering.
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about the author
philadelphia state hospital (aka byberry) circa 2002