Appalachian Decay

Lately I’ve been fascinated with urban decay, with images of metro Detroit coming to mind foremost – crumbling apartment buildings and empty malls, places once teaming with activity, all vacant and being reclaimed by the environment, turning back into the rural farmland that it was 100 years ago.  Like old west mining towns that dry up and turn into ghost towns after the silver was all dug up. It’s auto parts instead of silver now, but the fall into abandonment and ruin feels pretty similar.

 It’s probably all the apacolyptical movies from when I was a kid that draw me to it…mad max, day of the comet, Omega man, Terminator…

Anyway, it’s always amazing to me when you see one of these areas which obviously had hundreds or sometimes thousands of people occupying it; living, working, dying, and then over time, abandoning it. Whats left is such a strange shell, all it’s old bones, like animal bones you find in the woods. It’s sad to me too - all the hope that goes into building a house, perhaps generations of people living there, and then it’s left to rot, and all those memories, good and bad, are all lost to vines and birds and rain and snow, fire and rodents.

Which brings me to Ghosts in the Hollow from Jim Lo Scalzo on Vimeo. The tie-in to my family’s Appalachian roots (they were farmers, not miners, but that’s where my mother’s side of the family was from) grabbed me, but it’s easy to be taken in by the quiet beauty of these forgotten mining towns.

Ghosts in the Hollow from Jim Lo Scalzo on Vimeo.