We ♥ 100 Abandoned Houses by Kevin Bauman

Kevin Bauman has been documenting dilapidated and abandoned homes in his hometown of Detroit for about a decade. What began as a casual curiosity captured on film has become an engrossing and evocative project, 100 Abandoned Houses. The photographs convey a stark reality, the neglected former dwellings providing a striking symbol of the broader current economic decline. Says the artist: "I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence."

Looking at the images one by one imbues the collection with a surprising heft—each deteriorating exterior hints at its own unique past (ghosts in the shadows) but all succumb to the same decay. Taken all together, the project is also a poignant depiction of the age-old truism (and the classic Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick song): "A house is not a home."

"As the number of images grew, and a documentary style emerged, I switched from mostly black and white, to color, and decided to name the series 100 Abandoned Houses. 100 seemed like a lot, although the number of abandoned houses in Detroit is more like 12,000. Encompassing an area of over 138 square miles, Detroit has enough room to hold the land mass of San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan Island, yet the population has fallen from close to 2 million citizens, to most likely less than 800,000. With such a dramatic decline, the abandoned house problem is not likely to go away any time soon."
— Kevin Bauman