Restoration for Ghost Signs 

            Should <a class="expresscurate_contentTags" href="http://wreckyratbird.com/tag/ghost-signs/">#ghost signs</a> be restored? It gives me a funny feeling, as if something important is being lost, or faked or ruined in some way. I don't think a ghost sign can be restored perfectly. Even if it can be, should it be? Does it lose it's history when we try to restore it. Like patina on antiques, is a ghost sign something which keeps value once it gets updated or cleaned?

Eddy’s Bread Ghost Sign Restoration Project

Salisbury, NC Ghost Sign Restoration Project

Urban Exploration Lensography 

            <h3 class="subtitle">Take Only Photographs; Leave Only Footprints</h3>

Urban Exploration is about exploring in all areas, not always with permission. You might stand on the street and take photographs from a safe distance. You might wander into a storm drains, tunnels and sewers. You might climb to the highest rooftops and take a photo of your feet hanging over the edge looking down at the world below. You might go inside abandoned industrial buildings to photograph huge and mysterious machinery. You might go looking for signs of ghosts (and find raccoons) in a ruined farm house. You might venture into hidden, forbidden or just unknown areas of a city and photograph sites unseen. You might love finding a ghost sign, or a ghost town. The adventures are endless. Just dress accordingly, wear reliable footwear and pack your map and a camera into your trusty backpack before you start.

What Urban Exploration is Not

Urban Exploration is about Exploring

Urban exploration is what it sounds like – exploring urban areas. We take photos so we can:

  • get a better look at what we have seen
  • remember what we have seen
  • share what we have seen with others

Urban exploration is about history and photography.

Graffiti, destruction of property, salvaging from old places and setting fire and otherwise causing harm is not part of urban exploration. Also, explorers do not skywalk. Rooftopping is one thing, but the intent is to get a photograph safely, not to risk you life hanging over the edge of a building and getting a photo to prove you did it and dare others to do the same.

Urban exploration has some grey areas. Some explorers are very rigid in what they consider the rules. However, everyone who truly goes into this wanting to see old places does not want to see harm come to them. We don’t want to cause the property owner or management trouble or expense. The idea is to see the places and then leave as if we were never there.

This means we don’t move things around. We don’t leave garbage. We don’t break things. We don’t paint on things. We don’t try to jump off things.

Take only photographs and leave only footprints. It’s a great rule. People who don’t stick to it cross the line and become vandals.

Great Reading for History Loving Urban Explorers

Have you ever read something by H.P. Lovecraft?

Lovecraft was an urban explorer himself. He liked exploring old houses especially. In his books I’ve read descriptions of the old places which bring poetry to them I envy (as a writer and explorer myself). Anyone who has explored an old house, especially those who have explored many of them and still love finding yet another, will treasure reading Lovecraft’s short stories.

I knew about his books for a very long time but thought they were too gruesome and frightening for me. I think that would have been true while I was still a young woman of high school age. But, now that I am nearing 50 and a seasoned explorer… they seem more like stories I’ve heard before. This is no fault of H.P. Lovecraft.

His stories were horrifying, terrifying and gruesome enough at the time he wrote them. But, like an old house, we have become weathered to horror, especially when it’s in fiction. Lovecraft read horror, modern people see it in movies, which is far different than reading it in print.