Risk

I've always been a risk taker and an adventurer. I used to sneak out of the house at night to go to parties and hang out with friends; but what made me different from every other teenager doing the exact same thing was that I didn't do it for the parties. I did it because I loved the thrill of sneaking out. I told my friends many times that I'd rather hang out with them after curfew than beforehand. When they asked me why, I told them it was because I loved the absolute freedom that came with my parents thinking I was at home, safe and asleep. That was a lie. Many times if there wasn't anything to do one night and sneaking out wouldn't seem worth it, I'd do it anyway and wander over to the park where I'd lay on my back in the grass and look at the stars.
It got so bad that my parents had to start booby trapping the house at night. They tried everything to try and keep me safe: buckets of water, scotch tape on the door, and noisy pots and pans stacked outside my bedroom door at night. I showed up at parties drenched a few times, but I didn't really care. I refilled the buckets and put them exactly where my mother had placed them. I reset everything when I came home, or many times just found another way out. If she barricaded the door, I went out the window. If she blocked my window, I went out the bathroom window. I saw each of these traps as a new challenge and even enjoyed figuring out how to get around them.
Once, my mother tied our doorknobs together. My bedroom was directly across the hall from my parents' room. My mother closed my door, left hers open, and tied the doorknobs together with twine. If I opened my door that night, it would pull their door shut, and since their door creaked loudly every time it moved an inch, there was no doubt that even a slight tug on that string would wake my parents up.
I used my Swiss army knife as a screwdriver, took the doorknob apart, laid it on the ground and walked out of the house a free woman. When I came home several hours later, I put it all back together and my parents never knew the difference.
I was proud of these things even though I terrified my parents. I didn't understand how frightening it was for my parents to wake up, check on me and discover I had stuffed my bed full of pillows. I only understood how frightening it was for me to get a very angry call at 4:00 AM telling me to come home immediately. That was always a shock, and I even set my ringtone for my parents to Beethoven's 5th symphony so I and everyone else around me would know I was doomed the moment we heard my phone ring. My mother tried to explain to me countless times how dangerous it was for a blonde 16 year old to wander the streets late at night dressed all in pink. I didn't listen, and now consider myself lucky I wasn't mugged, raped or killed.

I eventually had to kick my habit of sneaking out. Most of my escapades took place during my sophomore year of high school, when we lived in Princeton, New Jersey for a year. The stairs in that house were newer and quieter, which made getting out the back door easy. When we moved back to our old creaky house in Carlisle, I quickly discovered that sneaking out was not a possibility. Our stairs were ancient and gave me away every single time.
A psychiatrist once wrote in my evaluation that I had an addiction to risk. My mother took this as an opportunity to tell me to stop sneaking out of the house at night and to get a dangerous job instead.
“You should just go to Baghdad and be a reporter,” she said. “That way you can really risk your life, and it won’t be for some dumb party, either.”
I realized my mother was right. My escapades were nothing more than an attempt at satisfying my craving for endangerment. After doing some research, I began immersing myself in something a little different; I began to learn the art of urban exploration. I would sneak out at night, and instead of going to parties, I would seek out abandoned buildings, beautiful old dilapidated structures, condemned heaps of gray wood resembling what used to be houses, and asbestos infested ghost towns. I came prepared. You'd be shocked to know how much equipment the average explorer owns; harnesses and ropes for climbing, cameras, flashlights, night vision goggles, gas masks, first aid kits, walkie talkies, compasses, multi tools, and extra batteries. These are just the basics that every explorer should own but not necessarily bring along on every single trip.
As I learned more about urban exploration, I became obsessed with the beauty of abandonments; they were keys to our past, shells of what society has left behind after its gaze turned toward a bitter future of austere steel skyscrapers and ugly tan warehouses squashed onto what used to be farmland. As I learned more about this so called "art", I learned the difference between a curious mind and a bored mind looking for something to occupy it with. I still get very heated when I try and explain to other people what I do and they say something along the lines of: "So do you do graffiti, too?" Vandals are a separate tribe, and urban explorers hate them with a passion, mostly because people get the two confused. More often than not, we're the ones labeled as vandals, trespassers and law-breakers. Why? Because our hobby is a silent, stealthy one; vandals leave behind spray paint splattered on brick walls, while urban explorers try to avoid even leaving footprints. Urban explorers have a code of rules; this sets us apart from people who graffiti or raid abandoned houses for valuables. We respect the places we explore and their previous inhabitants and seek only to preserve what everyone else wants to forget. The most we take is photographs, and all that we ever leave behind are footprints.
I began a photographic exploration of these buildings and discovered what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a photojournalist. Photography is merely one way of expressing a thought; an article accompanying a photograph doubles the impact of the information upon the viewer. I decided my best bet at having a career that I enjoyed was to become a photojournalist working overseas for a really liberal magazine, like The Nation. I wanted to travel to South Africa, Haiti, Darfur, Iraq, any place that had major problems going on, I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be the one to spread any news that wasn't already available. I wanted to document the people whose lives are at the heart of issues that others were afraid to even address, let alone engage themselves in.
But right now I'm happy exploring burned down mansions, caved-in apartments and houses straight out of every horror movie you've ever seen. I love the thrill of entering these houses and exploring them thoroughly, and I think it's a passion that will stick with me until I die. My photos of these buildings serve as a testament to my determination to capture what the rest of the world seems determined to forget.

Quick note...

Hey all, so I just wanted to write a quick post to emphasize the fact that what I post on my blog is my opinion. Not fact, opinion. It's my perspective on things, and if I'm extremely dramatic about it (like my last post), it's because I've chosen a particular tone for that piece of writing on purpose.

There are other urban explorers out there who know much, much more than me about their hobby, and that knowledge comes with experience. I have experienced plenty; it's definitely not enough to say that I'm an expert on urban exploration, but it IS enough to say that I am passionate about it. I don't claim to know everything; if you don't agree with me, fine. Disagreement is a good thing-- it's what makes us figure out the world NOT just according to our own perspectives.

I guess what I really want to say is that don't take my posts too seriously, don't think I am trying to speak for the entire urban exploration community, and respect the fact that this is my own perspective on it. When I refer to explorers as "we" in my writing, I do so NOT because I claim to speak for the entire community, but because it sounds better in creative writing, especially if you are describing an underground hobby. Underground ANYTHING always creates a world of "we" vs. "you" or "us" vs. "them"-- and I would sound like a stuck up know it all if all I talked about was "I did this, I am an explorer, I I I I I....".

"We" really creates a sense of there being another world, another community separate from the rest of society, which urban exploration is, in a sense. I want to portray that in my writing, so I use a plural pronoun instead of always talking about myself. I want to shift the focus away from myself and direct attention towards urban exploration as an art, a hobby and a community of explorers. The last thing I want this blog to be is me rambling on about myself and all the 'interesting' things I do all day-- there are already too many blogs about that. I DO like to write about my perspectives, which is different from just talking about myself all the time.

I hope everyone reading this understands what I mean-- and any urbexers reading this, don't think I'm trying to be a spokesperson for all of you, because I'm not.

Cheers,
Claire

An Urbexer's Rant

So before I start writing new pieces about urban exploration, I want to post up some older pieces that I've written that I think are necessary to put up.

NOTE:
The following piece was originally a letter to a reporter who wrote an article about urban explorers and all their "illegal/dangerous/stupid" activities after a local abandoned mansion was set on fire. She made no distinction between explorers and vandals, and so I got really, really mad (especially since my username on UER was mentioned in the article), and wrote a very angry letter to her explaining why we are different from people like her who just can't seem to separate legality from beauty, art and respect. I wanted to show her that we give more respect to property than the owners do and that the concept of "The New" (i.e. material possessions) is something urbexers hate and something that has taken over society. Urban exploring is a very noble and daring activity, and the feelings behind it are very much rooted in personal beliefs. When I read this over again and re-wrote it as an actual creative writing piece, I realized this is unlike most of my other writing. It's not funny; it's angry, hurt, frustrated and disgusted with the world. It has a tone of superiority reminiscent of Chuck Palahniuk's style, which I love. I think urban exploration and photography are the only things I can really write about this passionately at this point in my life. All of this writing came naturally—I remember the actual letter-writing took about 20 minutes, and revising it and adding to it later took about half an hour (after I re-read that horrible, stupid woman's article online).

Here's the link to the article, you should definitely read it, and check out the comments at the end-- they're great!
Click Here for The Article That Started My Rant!

And here's my response:


Dear Ms. Stephan,

Real explorers don’t kid around. We kid around and we end up injured, infected, in jail, or dead. Urban explorers are often given a bad reputation by graffiti artists and subway surfers. You know, the ones who ride the subway trains like surfboards and end up getting impaled through the eye by a piece of metal sticking out of the ceiling. You can call us illegal. You can call us criminals, but we are every bit as noble as your boy scouts, journalists, photographers and policemen. We take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints. We are the ones who protect your forgotten treasures from the tourist wishing to collect knick-knacks that aren't theirs, the land developer wishing to raze the skeletons of your lives, and the ignorant so-called "artist" who sees these cracked and broken shells as just another canvas for their postmodern depictions of teen angst flowing from the nozzle of a spray can.
I've seen the ones who call themselves urbexers; sometimes it's hard to tell if their bullshitting or not. They usually are. Those are the ones who arrive on the scene and while I'm taking pictures of your past, they're in the other room pocketing "collectibles". Real urban explorers never collect; we don't treasure the tangible, and we never covet. We desire only to see, learn, protect and preserve in memories and photographs.
Our activities are not crimes, but duties. We are the ones who have taken it upon ourselves to document and preserve everything you and your society have abandoned. We know everything about you that you've forgotten in the haze of new friends, new jobs, new schools, new possessions, and new lives. We loathe The New: we see it as an infestation, a disease and an obsession. We've learned to appreciate The Old, and we detest those who can't understand why. We creep and crawl over your property because we care more about your empty shells than you do. We make them ours for a night while you sleep peacefully in your beds with the bulldozers crouching outside of your window, waiting for the next morning when this masterpiece of abandonment will be reduced to splinters. We are the ones who make sure that it still exists as a whole—in our photographs and in our souls.
What is it like? you might feel compelled to ask. It's safe to say that it's like nothing you know or ever could know. It's like knowing a secret that twists you so forcefully inside and out that your only option is to make it your obsession. It is like a previously dormant instinct, newly awakened. It is like we are the ghosts—the only ethereal radiance that haunts your forgotten hallways is the gleam of our diffused flashlights shining through the dust. It's like picking up a broken antique doll with a cracked porcelain face, staring at it straight in its eerie blue eyes and seeing it come to life in your hands and tell you volumes about every child that once stroked its now dirt-encrusted hair. Other times it's like watching the same doll get sold to a collector who repaints it and gives it a brand new blonde head of hair. You call this restoration. We call this discarding true beauty.
You could never understand what it's like to hold onto the top rung of a storm drain ladder and watch the water rise to your feet, and then your knees, and then your waist, and you try desperately to force open the manhole cover from underneath that you just barely reached in time, having tried two others already that led into the middle of busy streets full of people like you. People like you could never understand what it's like to enter a private world of your hands and the camera and the subject, all communicating silently as you step over broken glass on a rotting wooden floor to take a closer picture of something else you left behind. You could never understand what it's like to feel the adrenaline rush when you see a cop's flashlight or hear a property owner's voice, and what it's like to have to make a decision whether to run or explain yourself. We usually run, because people like you blink at us when we explain ourselves and wonder why we don't just join them in their bigger, better fucked up world of The New.
We are not impressed by your newer, "better" structures. We are explorers of your past, and we are interested only in that which has been lost, forgotten, abandoned, broken, ignored, destroyed, trampled upon and left behind. We find beauty in your ugliness; we are those others you've heard of whose treasure is your trash. While you slip into your silken slumbers, we are donning backpacks, cameras, gloves, harnesses, tripods and gas masks. Our dreams are your nightmares.
The horror movies you watch never meet our eyes because we refuse to let a fiction invade our reality. Everyone is afraid for a reason, but we are the ones who refuse to make your excuses a part of our lives, and it leaves us strong and thirsty for risk. For you, asbestos is something to flee from; for us, it is the herald of an adventure. Every dark passageway and dusty staircase you shrivel away from is the same one that we yearn to travel.
Our greatest find might be that mansion you drive by every day with its plywood barriers and crumbling Roman columns. Most of our discoveries are found not by searching, but by realizing. We might suddenly remember an ancient house that no one has lived in for years and the fact that it is less than a block away. These are the greatest discoveries. For a while we were just like you. We forgot we knew about them.
During the day we are just like you. We have jobs, families and schools. We give back to society the way society wants us to give back. But when the sun sets we have a different agenda. We are stealth. We are adventurers of the night, and our only obsession is to creep down the asbestos-filled labyrinths of your past. We know everything you don't know about yourself. We are unbreakable and fearless.
We are urban explorers, and we go where you don’t.

A more formal introduction

So I've finally decided to give this blog a main topic. Obviously I may stray from the path occasionally, but I plan for this blog to mostly be about urban exploration. I enjoy writing about it, there are so many subgenres of urbexing and so many philosophies, codes and concepts woven into it that I can always find something to write about.

Anyone reading this who is also a member of UER (Urban Exploration Resource for those of you who don't know), thank you. I have a great amount of respect for all of the UER members who truly care about urbexing and really have learned to respect abandonments instead of deface them or scrap everything they can out of it for money. A true urbexer is one who gets all of the personal satisfaction they can out of their explorations through art, writing, history, photography, journalism, etc without actually taking anything that doesn't belong to them.

I believe urban exploration is an art form, and honestly, it's somewhat irrelevant that it's illegal most of the time. Urbexers know exactly what they're doing and are willing to risk the consequences for the sake of their art, and true artistic beauty is not, should not, and cannot be defined by its legality.


For any of you who still aren't clear on what exactly urban exploration is, it's an underground hobby that involved exploring abandonments. Abandonments is a very general term, because urbexers generally explore anything that can be considered "behind the scenes". For example, draining. Draining is exploring storm drains, usually by entering through a manhole. The tunnel systems in different regions can be very complex and fascinating to explore, while other drain systems are just one long, boring tunnel after another leading to the same places over and over again. Abandoned hospitals, mental institutions, schools and prisons are hotspots for explorers. I enjoy buildings like these because of all the history that can be learned before you actually enter them; when I do finally explore them, it's that much better if I find something that I can link back to what I already knew about the building's history. Urban exploring is also an inspiration for many photographers; not every urbexer is a photographer, but for many explorers, photography is a hobby that goes hand in hand with exploring. Most urban explorer's follow a kind of unwritten code, which is basically to take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints. Obviously not everyone follows this, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. For example, (speaking for myself here), I wouldn't respect someone who would tag a building with ugly graffiti, but someone who truly believes their graffiti is art and who actually has talent is someone I could admire. Someone who would strip an entire place of valuables to sell on Ebay is not someone I could respect. People who take pictures of themselves smoking cigarettes in an old wooden house and then post them up all over Flickr or Photobucket is not someone I could ever respect. Urban explorers develop a knack for scoping out a particular building or location, assessing the situation and acting accordingly. For example, smoking in an abandoned house made out of wood is a bad idea. Smoking in an abandoned facility with marble floors and tile walls is something else. Smoking is a bad idea either way, but you hopefully get my point.

So there was your introduction to the world of urban exploration. I DEFINITELY didn't cover even the tip of the iceberg, but there will be more writing to come.


For those of you who are interested in urban exploring and want to know more about it, definitely check out "The Art of Urban Exploration", by Ninjalicious. Yep, it's his alias-- and it's very appropriate, he was one of the great gods of urban exploration. Check it out if you ever get a chance!

I'm going to leave you with a few random photos I've taken during past explorations!

Chuggin

Look at me: 2nd day 2nd post, I think I'm doing pretty well! I sent in my course withdrawal form today (a few hours shy of the deadline), which means I have class on Monday mornings and afternoon, Wednesday morning, and the rest of the week is free except for a lesson and a few short meetings here and there. I have all kinds of free time now and have no idea what to do with it, although I DID make an octopus out of sticky-tac and a bear out of twist-ties today.

Hey, at least I accomplished SOMETHING.

A little about myself

So this is my first blog ever. Well not really; does Xanga at 14 years old count?
It was basically ramblings about the drama of daily life, but I guess I can't really claim that this is going to be much different, although I do like to convince myself that my life is slightly more important now than it was 4 or 5 years ago.

So here's ME in the present: I am currently a freshman at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. I am from Carlisle, went to the high school that's ohhh, about 3 blocks away from my dorm,
and my house is about 8 blocks away. Both of my parents are music professors at
Dickinson. My mom teaches voice and my dad is a musicologist (that's history of music) and directs a choir called Collegium Musicum. My main talents are photography and writing, and I intend to put those into a career in photojournalism (if things work out as planned, anyway). My whole life I wanted to get away from Carlisle, and I ended up going to college here. Great. I'm currently thinking about transferring, but it's a very half-baked plan. I applied to a specialty interest house on campus here at Dickinson for next fall called the Arts Haus, and whether or not I get accepted is really going to affect my decision whether or not to transfer.

The unfortunate thing about blogs is that you can't really post EVERYTHING about yourself, so to those of you that know me, yes, I'm leaving out some major details. I got in trouble this year at school; let's just say I have my own way of doing things. I'm not going to say I'm proud of it, because it gets me into trouble A LOT, but that's me, take it or leave it. I'm ADD as all hell, take Concerta for it (have been for 6 years, and no, I wasn't forced to take it or anything, it did wonders for my success in school), and am still constantly late for things. I live in a VERY small dorm room with a roommate who is my complete opposite, but we (thankfully) get along just fine and function pretty well as roommates (with compromises in place).

Oh and another major part of my life is urban exploration. I explore abandoned buildings for fun, take pictures, learn the histories of certain buildings, and just love abandonments in general. I am a full member on UER (for those of you that don't know what that is....too bad), and have been exploring for about 2 years. I posted a few of my photos as an introduction to my photography-- let me know what you think!