Beauty in Decay

In the beginning of Beauty in Decay: The Art of Urban Exploration, collaborators Jeremy Gibbs ("RomanyWG") and Patrick Potter posit that "the strange thing is not that Urban Explorers exist; it's that the rest of us have forgotten that we are Urban Explorers too." The book, published earlier this year by Gingko Press, features 200 photographs taken by Urban Explorers, people (Urbexers for short) who venture into abandoned buildings and industrial sites to explore their remains. Their motto is "Take only pictures, leave only footprints." The images in Beauty in Decay range from the strange (like Lin "Cypherone" Yung-Jei's Abandoned Future photos taken in Taipei) to the scary (pictures of rooms filled with children's respirators in a city near Chernobyl, Ukraine). Here, we present a slideshow of some of the most captivating images.