Urban exploration is the exploration of manmade structures, usually abandoned ruins or hidden components of the manmade environment. Photography and historical interest/documentation are heavily featured in the hobby, sometimes involving trespassing onto private property. Urban exploration is also called draining, urban spelunking, urban rock climbing, urban caving, building hacking, or mousing.
Ruins are the remains of a civilization's architecture. The term refers to formerly intact structures that have fallen into a state of partial or total disrepair over time due to a variety of factors, such as lack of maintenance, deliberate destruction by humans, or uncontrollable destruction by natural phenomena. The most common root causes that yield ruins in their wake are natural disasters, armed conflict, and population decline, with many structures becoming progressively derelict over time due to long-term weathering and scavenging.
Julia Solis is a writer and photographer who investigates ruined urban spaces. She is the founder of two arts organizations: Dark Passage and Ars Subterranea, both of which are dedicated to exploring and exposing New York City ruins and underground spaces.
Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically undertaken as professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.
Paul Raphaelson, is an American artist best known for urban landscape photography.
Camilo José Vergara is a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian.
Night photography refers to the activity of capturing images outdoors at night, between dusk and dawn. Night photographers generally have a choice between using artificial lighting and using a long exposure, exposing the shot for seconds, minutes, or even hours in order to give photosensitive film or an image sensor enough time to capture a desirable image. With the progress of high-speed films, higher-sensitivity digital sensors, wide-aperture lenses, and the ever-greater power of urban lights, night photography is increasingly possible using available light.
Robert Polidori is a Canadian-American photographer known for his large-scale color images of architecture, urban environments and interiors. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles. His photographs are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Château de Versailles, Centre Pompidou (Paris), and Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), as well as many private collections.
Ryūji Miyamoto is a Japanese photographer, best known as the “ruins photographer”. Having studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, he taught himself photography and began as an architectural journalist for magazines and newspapers. Inspired by the landscapes of post-war Japan that marked his childhood he came to reckon the imagery of destruction when he received a commission from Asahi Graph to document the demolition of the Nakano Prison in Tokyo.
Miru Kim is an artist, photographer, illustrator, and arts events coordinator, who has explored, documented, and photographed various urban settings such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, the Croton aqueduct, Paris catacombs, factories, hospitals, and shipyards.
Modern ruins are the remains of architecture constructed in the recent past, generally in the most recent century, or since the 19th century. The term is most frequently used by people performing urban exploration of man-made architecture that is abandoned or no longer accessible to the general public, such as structures abandoned through the process of urban decay. Enough documentation on these sites may have been lost over time that this unscientific exploration resembles archaeology of ancient ruins in the methods used to collect information.
Social documentary photography or concerned photography is the recording of what the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.
Ruin Academy is an independent cross-over architectural research center in the Urban Core area of Taipei City, Taiwan. It is 'set to re-think the industrial city and the modern man in the box' through research and a series of workshops.
Seph Lawless is an American photographer who has documented urban decay and abandoned spaces in the United States.
Marisa Scheinfeld is an American artist, photographer and educator currently living in New York. Marisa's work is highly motivated by her interest in ruins and the histories embedded within them. Her projects have taken her from the United States to Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and India. Her photographic projects and books are among the collections of Yeshiva University Museum, Lynn Kroll, The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, CA, The La Jolla Athenaeum in La Jolla, CA, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life The Edmund and Nancy K. Dubois Library at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA and The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation in New York, NY.
Andrew Lambdin Moore is an American photographer and filmmaker known for large format color photographs of Detroit, Cuba, Russia, the American High Plains, and New York's Times Square theaters. Moore's photographs employ the formal vocabularies of architectural and landscape photography and the narrative approaches of documentary photography and journalism to detail remnants of societies in transition. His photographic essays have been published in monographs, anthologies, and magazines including The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Fortune, Wired, and Art in America. Moore's video work has been featured on PBS and MTV; his feature-length documentary about the artist Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny, won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Moore teaches in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Carlos Garaicoa is a Cuban contemporary artist, specializing in photography and installations. Garaicoa became a prominent Cuban artist in the nineteen-nineties after a massive exodus of artists who had played a decisive role in the Cuban art movement of the nineteen-eighties. His pieces often carry social and political commentaries about life in Havana. Garaicoa's work is known to draw on post-modernist theory to connect aesthetics to meaning within urban spaces and architecture.
Johnny Joo is an American photographer. He photographs urban decay in abandoned and historic structures.
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are a French duo, working primarily with a large-format view camera and concentrating on photography of contemporary urban ruins. They live and work in Paris.
Komatsu Hiroko (小松浩子) is a Japanese artist and photographer. She was born in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan in 1969. She has held exhibitions both domestically in Japan and internationally in countries such as Germany, Italy, and the United States. She received the 43rd Kimura Ihei Award for new photographers in 2018. She has also received a grant from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.
