Through a Lens Darkly
Smith Eliot

I guess I was about nine when I first became interested in the abandoned house across the street from our apartment complex on the outskirts of Munich. On Sunday, my parents told me not to go there. They warned me: I would be cut by broken windows, the floor would cave, the rafters fall, and you never knew… strange men might be hiding in the attic. On Monday I was scheduled—as I was every Monday—to climb the stairs into the bus destined for Munich International School. I climbed, instead, through the kitchen window of my first “haunted” house. I remember, I crept on tiptoes across shards of broken glass into the bedroom, and there I stood, as still as midnight—breathing, listening.
The wall was covered with blistered wallpaper. A stained, sheetless mattress was wedged into a corner, and two empty coat hangers dangled from nails in the closet wall. I suddenly became aware that I was standing in a place where people had fought and fallen in love, where the smells of food cooking had wafted through the air. This was a place that was formerly filled with books and furniture, with clocks ticking, with towels in the bathroom, neatly folded and set into stacks. All gone…but not exactly gone. There were decaying remnants, true, but more than this, there was a feel to things. It was as though all the former inhabitants—all the objects, people and animals—had invisibly imprinted themselves here. And it was here, in this dank place, I first came to believe that there was more to this life than flesh. My search for this “elusive more” is the single permanent thread that dominates all my photographic work. Although many of my photo shoots take place in abandoned structures, I am less interested in exploiting the eye candy of decay than I am in bumbling into a moment emblematic of this “elusive more.” It’s the oddness of things, the otherness of the Other that catapults us into the Land of the Interim, into that place between “is” and “will be.” There’s a rhythm, a pulse, a squeak and churn to small things struggling to exist. Sometimes I don’t see it; other times I see it just briefly…and I press the shutter release somewhere between blush and decay.