A few weeks ago we presented the work of photographer Andrew Emond in an essay by William Carroll. We follow up with a conversation between William and Andrew as a companion to the earlier piece.

William Carroll: I was first shown your instagram page by a friend, and was of course immediately struck by your style and subject matter. How important has this kind of word-of-mouth publicity been to the growth of your page and profile?

Andrew Emond: I’d say it’s been pretty essential. I haven't really gone out of my way to promote the work in any significant way so the growth of my account has happened fairly organically. I'm a bit stubborn when it comes to just letting things evolve that way-- and hopefully having people respond favourably to the work. I’m sure there are faster ways to grow an instagram account, but taking the slow and steady approach is more my style and seems to be working fairly well so far.

WC: I remember when I first contacted you I asked about the tagline in your bio which reads 'Messages from the Interior'. Having studied the American photographer Walker Evans, I asked you if this was a direct homage to Evans to which you assented. How important has Evans been, and indeed other American photographers, to the development of your style?

AE: I didn’t study photography in school so I wasn’t really aware of Evans’ work beyond his most iconic images. I started taking photographs of abandoned spaces in 2004 and for about four years I was just doing my own thing, working in a creative vacuum and staying pretty naive when it came to the history of photography in general. Coming across Evans, and in particular his treatment of vernacular interiors was enlightening and encouraging. It’s been this way with other photographers whose work I’ve discovered along the way, ilike John Divola or Lynne Cohen.

When I find similarities in other bodies of work, I don’t get discouraged because it’s been done before, but try to use it as something I can springboard off of or respond to. What I love about Evans’ book Message From the Interior is its sense of mystery. The whole thing, even its title (what’s the message?) is a riddle. It’s also a bit of a fuck-you to the the perception that he was a social documentary photographer or even a documentary photographer to begin with.

WC: You're based in Toronto and so the majority of your photography is informed by the city. Do you look for the same kinds of abandoned/disused spaces when you're travelling? Do you have any intentions of long-term projects outside of Toronto?

AE: I tend to treat travelling as a way to take a break from what I’m usually photographing in Toronto or sometimes photography in general. I’ll shoot in a different style and generally be less concerned about projects or themes. I haven’t considered working on anything outside of Toronto in a very long time. I can’t imagine it happening unless I had the opportunity to spend an extended period of time in one particular location. It’s pretty hard-wired in me to look for neglected places at this point, so if I do visit them outside of Toronto, it’s more for the experience than anything.

I also feel like slipping in interiors from other places is a bit like cheating. My photographs aren’t intended to be a record of Toronto. I’m not really interested in making any particular statement about this city or even the nature of the spaces themselves. These photos are often more about me than anything else. I want the places to be anonymous, but at the same time I want them to be located here. There’s a logistical reason in that I usually don’t have more than a few hours a week to shoot, but I also get a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment by producing this body of work using what I have around me.

WC: What other media informs your work? I'd be really interested to hear what films, literature, and even music inspire you? I often find that creatives have myriad interests, and your work conjures up quite a few in my case. I find it hard not to hear Godspeed You! Black Emperor when studying your work...

AE: Painting, sculpture, and installation art are often my biggest influences. Sometimes I’ll walk into a space and the arrangement of objects reminds me of particular works in modern or contemporary art. There’s also sometimes a fair amount of staging and intervention that takes place in my photos so I often find myself taking cues from those mediums.

Then there are other things, like the novel Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Stalker by Tarkovsky, certain songs like It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue by Dylan, R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP, that wonderfully strange room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m drawn to things that have subtle elements of surrealism. Godspeed is a little too moody for me, but the way they sway between tranquility and chaos is certainly something I try to bring into my own work.

WC: Lastly, I guess I just want to focus a bit on the state of things in 2020. Your work has taken on an eerie prescience given the current climate, which I reference in the companion article. Do you feel an unsettling clairvoyance in your work? Did you envisage these spaces becoming semi-normalised, all those years ago, when you started photographing them?

AE: I’m not sure anyone could have predicted vacancy becoming semi-normalized even a few months ago. Toronto is like a lot of other cities around the world right now, with shuttered businesses and empty workplaces as employees are now working from home. I’m sure there are many scenes inside buildings right now that resemble ones found in my photos, but I’m resistant to creating a commentary on this current situation.

Years ago, I was keen on making a statement about deindustrialization and the loss of jobs happening during that particular era, but these days my hope is that this body of work is a bit more timeless and open-ended. I’m still very much conscientious of the fact that some of the places I visit are the way they are due to economic or personal misfortune-- some of it may even be COVID-19 related, but those sorts of backstories add a layer of real-world context that I try to avoid.

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

By William Carroll:

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page feels like the visual diary of an apocalypse, a compendium of photographs that chart a beautiful, devastating collapse. The gutted maws of baroque fireplaces leer out at empty rooms, with dusty tchotchkes and ripped hardcovers gathering about the mantelpieces. Old staircases, their bannisters splintered and broken, lead up and down invariably to darker unknowns. In one photograph, uploaded on April 28th 2020, a disordered back office is punctuated by an old CTR television set, showing static. A piece of stock art, parodying the halcyon days of the Hudson River School, dangles limply above it. Elsewhere, in a photograph taken in an old office complex, a prosthetic CPR mannequin sits upright among a pile of assorted metal debris. “Everything’s Fine,” Emond’s caption reads.

Based in Toronto, and using a Samsung Galaxy S8 to take his images, Emond is a photographer to whom urban decay, domestic neglect, and the general collapse of capitalist spaces pose an irresistible lure. Mostly shot in square format, a technique which Emond admitted often confuses people into thinking he’s shooting on film, his images are like dystopian Wes Anderson still frames. Centrally aligned, with often a visual pun substituting the need for a lengthy caption, the images are frequently colourful in spite of all their internal disorder. Armchairs with stuffing foaming their edges are often captured front-and-centre, whilst mirrors (often broken) refract what lies beyond the frame ad infinitum. The sheer ubiquity of these scenes that Emond happens upon – ‘I find 95% of these places myself’ – suggests that the equivalent collapses of public space are happening everywhere simultaneously. For each new unit erected on an industrial estate in record time, all polished metal and girders, there is another hulking wreck a few miles away in which birds roost and wild animals haunt. Emond has no time or interest in the former.

When I first came across Emond’s photography on Instagram, I was immediately struck by two particularities of his profile. Firstly, his style of so-called ‘Abandoned Porn’ – an aesthetic movement particularly in vogue during this age of ‘dark tourism’ - was as visually arresting as it was disquieting. Whose front room is this, that lies so unloved and in such squalor? Where is this office complex, with the glass of its dividing walls and conference rooms scattered across the floor like so much snow? These spaces seemed at once anonymous and yet tied inextricably to their recent abandonment. I wanted to know where, when, who. At the same time, I was also strangely afraid of the answers.

When browsing his catalogue of colourful destruction, I was struck by his profile’s bio, which reads: ‘Messages from the interior. ’I’d heard that before, but couldn’t quite place it. Eventually, something clicked and I reached out to Emond via direct message.

“Is the bio line a nod to Walker Evans or am I reading too much into that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s totally a nod. Glad someone noticed,” he replied.

The tradition of Evans’ style is evident across Emond’s work – so often is he positioned on the threshold of some devastated scene, haunting the doorway of an apartment left to ruin or turning the corner of a long, snaking corridor. His captions, like Evans, are similarly obscure, obtuse, or metatextual, rarely betraying anything beyond the scene’s immediacy. This brevity extends to subject matter, too. Evans believed in the beauty of the quotidian, and his frequent subjects, especially during the Depression, included rustic kitchens, empty chairs, and tenant farmer shacks slowly eroding in the dustbowl winds. Separated by nearly a century, Emond’s modern answer to Evans’ vernacular, documentary style feels distinctly modern and prescient, doubly so in the current pandemic.

These abandoned spaces have become familiar to many of us over the last 6 months, and the tragic decline of thriving commercial centres and local businesses has become a plague in of itself. When one set of shutters have fallen, all too often have two more followed suit. In spite of this stark and alarming present we inhabit, Emond’s recording of these spaces far before COVID-19 suggests a certain inevitably. The novel coronavirus may have hastened certain violences, certain collapses, but Emond reminds us that these scenes have been around far longer, and will continue their own ironic propagation as generations change, as the global climate passes its own event horizon, and people continue steadfastly in their living and their dying. To have such a public record of that, and to make it so readily available to anyone with a phone, feels both voyeuristic and yet undeniably creative. Emond isn’t the first person to document abandoned scenes through the medium of photography, but his spartan equipment, use of Instagram, and traditional influences mark a unique and appealing documentarian.

Beyond the simple aesthetics, there are many literary qualities to Emond’s work and a raft of cinematic influences that likewise bleed in. Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and indeed, the film’s own source material of Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, are immediately called to mind in his darker, industrial scenes where refuse lies scattered and discarded as if by some uncaring, unseen monster. In his more colourful domestic scenes, where the detritus of family life has pooled like floodwater, I can’t help think of Grey Gardens (1975) or even modern television programmes centred around ‘hoarders’ and their obsessive inventorying of everyday life. Our own perverse interests in the spectacle of collapse are widely documented, from Freud’s ‘Death Drive’ to Suzi Mirgani’s Spectacles of Terror (2017), and Emond’s images represent all of these interests in neat, square packages that can be consumed individually or en masse. There will always be photographs to take, always rooms that have been locked for years. This is not a finite pursuit.

Above all these converging influences and themes in Emond’s work – [which he alludes to in the interview I conducted with him] - there is a single lyric that I find myself humming, even singing, when looking through his work. It’s from Sebadoh’s ‘Spoiled’, a song made famous for its use in Larry Clark’s controversial coming-of-age film Kids (1995) – a film in which the grimy underside of New York is not a world away from Emond’s tenement interiors. The lyric captures the lure of Emond’s work and why we, as a race, continue to find beauty in our own destruction:

We will wait for tragedy
And scatter helpless to the fire.

As haunting and pertinent as it may be, I can’t help think Emond would find it a bit too on the nose. Evans would too, no doubt. They’re both probably right.

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

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The Beautiful Abandoned: An interview with Andrew Emond

The Beautiful Abandoned: Andrew Emond’s photography of urban decay

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