Charles Anselmo

Within the fabric of our cities are abandoned places which prompt complex questions concerning design, motivation and waste. I photograph the strange dissonances of this forgotten urban landscape, attempting to understand how memory changes perception as we reconsider the past.

Addressing issues of transition and history, my images reflect the role of the human witness in environments saturated with rich metaphorical subtext and a hidden world of remnants. Expressing their own visually inherent narratives, these disparate, fragmented realities remain disconnected from their original identities.

My photographs are linked by the visual elements and textures of broken structure and interiors, but ultimately this work is more explicitly concerned with the intersection of place memory and social context. Working with medium and large format film, I embrace an attempt to fuse aesthetic forms with social ideas as a way of interpreting the past, photographically captured in the warm palette of decay.