Sourcing and Process

Urban Exploration is the modern hobby of exploring predominantly abandoned man-made structures to document, photograph, or experience a place and its history. In places like Pittsburgh with rich industrial histories, many old steel plants, factories, and even churches remain abandoned and decaying. Though many of these decaying structures around us have been forgotten, urban explorers continue to document and experience the shells of Pittsburgh's industrial history.

The Urban Exploration Resource (UER) is the largest and most used website for documenting these photos and experiences. Using this database of abandonments, I chose 8 images of places in Pittsburgh which included a church, a train, and a steel mill. I then created a collage by placing them all on a Photoshop document. After playing around with occupancy, changing colors, and erasing parts so it all fit together, I added a image of a vintage veil before putting a final "dry brush" filter on it.