As an art-obsessed teenager Matthew Christopher despised photography.
“I thought it was bullshit,” said the Harrisburg-area native. “I thought it was cheating: point and click. I didn’t understand the intricacies.”
His perspective changed when, as an employee at a Philadelphia-area mental hospital, he visited a shuttered state institution, one of those Victorian-age solutions that, by the mid-20th century, were seen as despicably archaic, little more than warehouses for the unwanted.
“I was immediately interested in the philosophical implications of how we as a country have dealt with mental health,” he said. “What is the difference between incarceration and hospitalization? Who defines sanity?”
It later became the subject of Christopher’s MFA thesis and the beginnings of a body of work that would take on all manner of decaying or disused structures: factories, houses, hotels, theaters, resorts, schools, churches, prisons. Some 3,000 images are collected on his website, abandonedamerica.us
He also has shown his work locally. In recent years, he has mounted exhibits at the Yellow Wall Gallery at Midtown Scholar Bookstore, the Gallery at Walnut Place and McKissick & Associates, all in Harrisburg, as well as at galleries in Lancaster, Lebanon and Perry counties.
Sweat & Dreams
Like few other societies, America, since the Industrial Revolution, has gotten good at building things by the sweat and dreams of one generation, only to let them crumble by the next. Built either on imperial-age colonialism or post-war exuberance, the America of the millennial age is dotted with these wrecks as never before.
And to Christopher, they say something profound about our national character. Often what economists call “creative destruction” and sociologists term “de-urbanization,” Christopher sees as merely hubris. His catalog is dubbed “an autopsy of the American dream.”
“I look at our society as a big party of people who go out to dinner, eating and drinking as much as they can, and then realizing they don’t have enough to pay the tab,” he said. “They assume someone else was covering them.”
The study of this process is nothing new. James Howard Kunstler’s groundbreaking study of urban landscapes, “Geography of Nowhere,” is 20 years old, and people were chronicling the decay of a deindustrialized America in numerous forms even before that.
But, in Christopher’s images, layers of dust seem too delicate to be real, limping floor joists roll like waves, wallpaper flakes seem like snow. There is a tragic beauty in the decay that few others have been able to render. And, while almost none of Christopher’s work shows actual human presence, almost every one leads the viewer toward thinking of who once lived, loved, toiled, learned, worshipped or battled madness in these buildings.
Such places are left with uncertain futures and wait again to be useful, or in most cases, to simply be erased. “People are very attached to places even years after they no longer live or work there,” he said. “To many, letting a factory or a school fall into disrepair, in a way, invalidates the time they spent there, the work they did.”
Troubling Currents
Christopher has become not only an expert on the artistic schema of decay, but the mechanics as well. Looking at a crumbling wall, there is a clear difference between ordinary structural failure and the work of scrap hunters. He’s been on this quest so long that, most of the time, he admits to being immersed in the technical aspects of his work on location, and less so in the emotional. “Some places just reek of despair, though.”
Churches and schools are probably the most difficult, he says. “Churches are unlike any other building in that the whole purpose is to be art, to be beautiful, to awe people into thinking of divine things, of this plane and that which is holy.”
As mainline urban churches fall out of use due to the demographic tide of suburbanization, some are bought up by small Pentecostal or evangelical upstarts. Many are not. “Considering what they were built for, there is a troubling symbolism in that.”
Schools are the civic equivalent of churches: vessels of hope and aspiration. “The idea of the American dream has always included that, with hard work and ingenuity, you can rise above your caste,” he said. “That’s always been facilitated in large part by our educational system. When schools go, then you’re knocking out the rungs of that ladder.”
Even when old, decaying schools are replaced by bright, new ones, there are often troubling currents, as in once case in Philadelphia recently. “They were demolishing the old building and there was a pile of textbooks in the courtyard…two stories high. The kicker is that they were in good condition. And we hear about how so many schools don’t have supplies?”
Disposable consumption has a cost, and only now are we beginning to tally the bill, his work implies.
All of Christopher’s photos, even the most minutely detailed ones, hint at similar narratives. “If you’re working just from an artistic standpoint, you are going to be missing out on most of the story, and, if you shoot solely as a documentarian, then your pictures won’t be interesting.”
Christopher looks for the transcendental, timelessness, a permanence to things that goes beyond the temporality of the subject itself.
Take a pair of shoes, for example. “You leave them by your bed. When you come back they are still there. That’s something we filter out because it’s quite normal.”
Now imagine an identical pair of shoes next to a bed in a farmhouse shuttered and ignored for 30 years. “Immediately, you start asking questions. Who did these shoes belong to? Where did they go? Why were they left here?” All of a sudden, a simple pair of shoes is telling a story.
Christopher’s work has, at times, mistakenly been lumped into the “ruin porn” discussion, an accusation leveled at some who gravitate toward dying rustbelt cities like Youngstown, Detroit, or Braddock, Pa., to shoot the wreckage in a fashion that residents often see as exploitative. Christopher has weighed in on that debate but has now grown weary of it.
Surely, a photograph of neglect and decay can be an indictment, and that is indeed a subtext of his work, the artist admits. But even exploitative art can begin a discussion, and it’s a discussion that needs to begin, he adds. “And an image is about the only thing that can grab anyone’s attention anymore.”
Learn more about Matthew Christopher, see more images of his work and learn about his exhibits at abandonedamerica.us.
