Aesthetics of Dilapidation

Olivo Barbieri More than Movies Artistic Take on Tourism

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Jeffrey Richard Stockbridge is trying to move on, but his first major opus won’t entirely let him be. The Philadelphia-based photographer came to prominence in 2005, as a runner-up for the New York Times Magazine College Photography Contest, with works from his "Occupied" series, large-scale color pictures of interiors of abandoned houses. Completed a year later and published in book form, the series, along with a related 2007 project, continues to be shown in galleries across the Northeast. This month it can be seen at the J. Cacciola Gallery in New York.

The 25-year-old Stockbridge, however, is not dwelling on the past. "I’ve always been aware of all the other factors and issues and relevance that existed around this project," he says. "I began to feel as though I could do this better, I could do this differently." This seems to be exactly what he’s done in his latest work, which has yet to be published or exhibited.

The "Occupied" series was born of a combination of precocious artistic ambition and a youthful sense of discovery. Having moved from the Maryland countryside to Philadelphia to study photography at Drexel University, Stockbridge was amazed by a disturbing feature of his new home: the thousands upon thousands of abandoned houses he claims exist in the city. "As a college student, I was skipping around from place to place, moving every year for five years, and I noticed that there were houses that were abandoned in pretty much every neighborhood I lived in. And that intrigued me," he says. Getting into the homes was "remarkably easy. I’d say more than half the time you can walk right in the front door. Some of these properties are not boarded up at all."

Once inside, he had all the time he needed to find his subjects and compose his photographs. Stockbridge worked with a 4x5 viewfinder camera, using only available light. It was a laborious process that involved lugging around a 50-pound camera, carefully setting the lens, and waiting for just the right light, which often meant waiting for hours.

At first glance, the photos seem to promote an aesthetic of dilapidation; they are like a downscale, urban-contemporary take on the modern-day romance with classical ruins. But look closely and you’ll notice that something funny is going on with the focus. Stockbridge employs the so-called tilt-shift method, which allows for a selective area of intense focus. A single object — a bare mattress in the middle of the room, a shaft of light creeping through a crack in a boarded-up window, a gargoyle on a staircase landing — appears in sharp relief, while everything around it is in a soft haze.

The tilt-shift method has been popularized by photographers such as Olivo Barbieri and Vincent Laforet, who both turn distant aerial shots into what look like views of miniature models. For Stockbridge, it is a way to simulate the moment of discovering a new space. "When I enter a room," he says, "my eye is going to go one place. Right off the bat, it’s going to go to the brightest part of the room, or it’s going to go to an object of interest in the room. Everything else is sort of out of focus; it’s all in my peripheral vision. I wanted to find a way of capturing that feeling, of looking at something but not knowing what else is there yet." His photographs capture the excitement and sense of dislocation associated with discovery. But the effect also toys with the viewer’s perception, causing him to question the sense of scale and, Stockbridge hopes, "look deeper and further for meaning."

It is here that the series introduces an element of unresolved tension. Despite their striking beauty, the "Occupied" photos seem torn between Stockbridge’s formal and aesthetic ambitions (what he calls "a personal, spiritual understanding of the spaces") and a documentary urge to describe a particular form of urban blight and show what departed inhabitants have left behind. To help achieve this second goal, Stockbridge displays his photos alongside found objects recovered from the homes: bent snapshots and yellowing letters that are meant to tell the story of the erstwhile occupants. Striking documents, or "artifacts" as Stockbridge calls them, they seem to obscure the meaning of the works.