Abandoned Industrial Places: Factories, Laboratories, Mills and Mines that the World Left Behind

The pleasure of viewing a ruin is a human trait that goes a long way back. Ancient writers liked to muse on the idea of a city or castle reduced to the haunt of owls, with nettles and brambles growing out of broken paving and crumbling walls. In modern, post-industrial times, this notion has taken a sharper edge. The lives of industrial installations are measured in decades rather than centuries. In many places, recently built structures stand redundant and silent.

This collection of images includes power plants, factories, mills and hospitals, often with their machinery intact. From Alaska to Patagonia, from Norway to Japan and Nigeria, fragments of the industrial past are all around us.