Impermanence
I shot this photo with an old Nikon pocket camera after slinking into an abandoned building in New York.
When the camera went click, I wondered:
Who stood where I was standing? What kind of work did they do? What was the dresser for?
Silence was the only reply.
I stopped my breathing and tried to hear the past.
Conversations only the decaying ceiling remembers.
Locked behind us all in memories forgotten.
Reminding us all that the future is just a vision.
And all that is true reality is the now.
I smiled at how to capture such a precious thing,
Just as the camera went click.
Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2017
A Glimpse of Green
A glimpse of green is all I can see
From behind this wasting wall
Erected by solitude and razed with laughter
I’m trapped beneath the mute judgment of decaying brick
Each stone laid hurriedly by coarse hands that shake in the cold
With blistered fingers that crack and bleed and long to brush that smile again . . .
Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2016
Derelict Dreams
I took these photos inside several abandoned homes, and I was fascinated by the messages and artwork throughout the houses.
Echoes of the past.
Words that perhaps outlived their own scribes.
I experimented a little in post-production to reflect the decay I felt and experienced just walking through those deserted rooms.
Walls that once cradled happy (or not-so-happy) memories now housing empty spaces—spaces that followed me weeks after the shoot.
Photographs copyright Mike Yost 2015
Silent Spaces
I took these at some abandoned houses in the Colorado Mountains. There’s something fascinating to me about derelict buildings, these silent spaces where maybe children once giggled at the dinner table over a plate of uneaten carrots, where perhaps a father or a mother wept alone in the shower over the loss of their own parents, where entire families once slept soundly beneath a vast canopy of timeless stars.
These silent spaces now an echo of lives lived, their home slowly retreating into the Earth.
Photographs copyright Mike Yost 2015
Forsaken
“Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay; the worst is death and death will have his day.”
—William Shakespeare, Richard II
Photograph copyright Mike Yost 2015
