Sometimes, on a street corner, a forgotten but flamboyant façade recalls past glories. It's there to remind everyone that cinema is immortal.
The packed audiences of darkened cinema rooms are no more. People are gradually drifting back home to lounge in front of a multitude of online platforms, far less expensive than a trip to the picture palace. Habits have changed... the cinema is no longer a world of magic.
Movie theatres have lost their splendour, often pushed into the suburbs and choked left and right by fast-food chains as if they were ashamed to exist at all.
However, some of this fabulous heritage dedicated to the stuff of dreams which cinemas once were still exists, especially in France. This is one of the few countries left where theatres are still being built, sometimes with audacious architecture. Also, France is a place where their demise is fervently denied.
Each story within this art book has been carefully crafted to weave seamlessly between the visuals, creating an immersive experience that will keep you captivated from start to finish.
Introducing an unprecedented fusion of AI and storytelling, a groundbreaking art book that will take you on a journey through vivid and surreal visuals that don't exist. With each turn off the page, you'll be drawn deeper into a world crafted in collaboration between the author and a machine, where familiar places and concepts take on entirely new meanings. These visuals will leave you feeling simultaneously confused, excited, and hungry for more, as you explore a world that exists only in the mind of Simon and the algorithms that generated it. From the placid beaches to surreal fashion shots, this book will transport you to places never were, unveiling the beauty and mystery of an AI-generated universe.
This book is a tribute to reminders of the golden age of movie theatres the world over, now silent but determined not to be forgotten.
Simon Edelstein has spent twelve years travelling around the world - the USA, France, Italy, India, Morocco and Cuba - in search of abandoned cinemas, visiting far-flung areas in cities in over thirty countries, on the lookout for forgotten building façades, worn by the ravages of time, that still reveal signs testifying to their former glory.
Although these timeworn and forgotten picture palaces, asleep under the dust of so many years, have long ceased to be the focus of the Saturday night crowds, they reveal to Simon Edelstein's lens their splendid archaeological record of frontages, entrances, and vast auditoriums - like ships lost at sea.
This book is a tribute to reminders of the golden age of movie theatres the world over, now silent but determined not to be forgotten.
An exceptional photographic report.
Discover the former hunting lodge of the Duchess of Parma, a spectacular abandoned Moorish castle, the remains of film studios with the scenery from a Pinocchio film, a disused psychiatric asylum, a famous but now-forgotten discotheque in a mock medieval castle, the ruins of a renowned spa hotel ravaged by fire ... Robin Brinaert has been travelling around Italy for over eight years in search of these abandoned, forbidden, forgotten places. He highlights the sometimes dramatic fate of our heritage - a serious reflection on safeguarding.
Through his camera lens, Francis Meslet sends a strong message about deindustrialisation, neighbourhood abandonment, and the beauty and fragility of our heritage - all while inviting us to reflect on how to protect it for future generations.
Between 2010 and 2023, Francis Meslet travelled around Belgium looking for abandoned places - witnesses to history and the socio-economic changes that have shaped the country. What began as a way of documenting the neglect of industrial and urban monuments, quickly expanded to include other dispossessed places: factories, industrial wastelands, schools, churches, Roman baths, swimming pools, theatres, mansions, castles, and hospitals, for example. His photography captures the grandeur and decadence of one of the oldest European nations.
Barren red deserts dotted with post-colonial ghost towns, dilapidated inner city factories, discarded country homesteads and a succession of dormant, soot-filled power stations are just a handful of the desolate, yet visually rich narratives that form part of the abandoned Australia landscape.
Digging beneath the sun-baked soil, Shane Thoms uncovers the modern ruins scattered over this arid continent and reveals a series of beautifully broken abodes hiding in the crevices of the Great Southern Land.
Whispering of both long-gone happy family moments and human darkness, of working lives and the everyday pursuits of living, these atmospheric scenes allow us to reconstruct the stories of the past. Prompting conversations about a growing, diverse country with a complicated history, these abandoned places both connect as well as contrast the past and the present and chronicle the hidden remnants of the evolving Australian story.
Between 2012 and 2019 Francis Meslet photographed several hundred places of worship across Europe. Over time, these places have became enveloped in silence, the only thing heard there now an occasional gust of wind whistling though broken stained glass, or the rhythmic drip of water leaking through the dilapidated roof above a nave. Nevertheless, these muted places still draw an occasional visitor. Once upon a time, prayers could be heard recited in Latin in a German church; and in a French Catholic college, the voices of children once resounded to the sound of the bells. But who can imagine what sounds might be concealed behind the walls of a crypt in the heart of the Italian mountains, or within a tomb in a former convent in Portugal?
In the early 20th century the streets of small towns and cities across America were filled with the lights and sounds of movie theaters. The most opulent - known as «movie palaces» - were designed to make their patrons feel like royalty; people would dress up to visit. But as time went on it became harder and harder to fill the 2,000+ seat theaters and many were forced to close.
Today, these palaces are illuminated only by the flicker of dying lights. The sound of water dripping from holes in the ceiling echoes through the auditoriums. In After the Final Curtain: America's Abandoned Theaters internationally-renowned photographer Matt Lambros continues his travels across the United States, documenting these once elegant buildings. From the supposedly haunted Pacific Warner Theatre in Los Angeles to the Orpheum Theatre in New Bedford, MA - which opened the same day the Titanic sank - Lambros pulls back the curtain to reveal what is left, giving these palaces a chance to shine again.
Roman Robroek is an urban-obsessed and award-winning photographer, born and raised in the enchanting south of the Netherlands. He takes unique photos of forgotten abandoned places all over the world. What is the story behind those buildings? Who used to live there? What purpose did these objects serve, and why were they abandoned? This curiosity has created a close bond between him and Urban Photography, and Oblivion is the result of the last 10 years, which he spent exploring incredible ghostly locations, trying to answer these endless questions.
Abandoned Spain Fran Lens - Paco Quiles - Carlos Sanmillán Villages bombarded during the Spanish Civil War that were not rebuilt after the fighting, a huge international railway station abandoned at the border with France, an old military munitions dump hewn deep within a mountain, the remains of Spain's first fossil-fuelled power plant, a forgotten pharmaceutical laboratory, a ghost ship, a closed blast furnace, the spectacular vestiges of a hydraulic dam, a forbidden sanatorium, a former cement factory...For a decade, Fran Lens, Paco Quiles and Carlos Sanmillán have travelled around Spain in search of these abandoned and forgotten places.An exceptional photographic report.
This report invites the reader to relive, through its striking pictures, more than a hundred years of history, from the beginnings of the Soviet period to the legacy of a communist era now fast fading from memory.
Terence Abela has spent nine years travelling across the former USSR unearthing fragments from its past. His love of history, of photographing relics of the past and discovering the unknown, have combined to create this work. Driven by a desire to preserve the heritage abandoned by states that lurch between the threat of nationalism, dictatorship, wars and the will to invent a new history for themselves, he appeals to us through his pictures to protect these mementos which are at risk of disappearing in the not too distant future.
Beautiful yet haunting photographs of abandoned places in Lebanon - once thriving buildings now ravaged by nature and time are the subject of this fascinating, coffee table photo book. Lebanon is a country that still holds many secrets of what life was like there prior to the civil war, and more recently the Beirut port blast.
Inside, we discover ruins, deserted buildings, and glamorous architecture all tucked away from the public eye. These include the abandoned mansion of a former prime minister, one of the most remarkable buildings in Zokak el-Blat, Beirut, a once glorious hotel now bearing its war wounds, a 17th-century palace in Deir El Qamar, and a stunning yet unfinished passion project, where each arch of the structure reflects a different civilisation.
