Photographer Brings Abandoned Buildings Into Focus

By Nancy K. Crevier

“Urban Exploration,” the photographic exhibition on display at Mocha Coffee House on Glen Road this month, is Sandy Hook resident Marnie Werner’s interpretation of the beauty found beneath decay and neglect. 

The exhibit is the first public show by Ms Werner, who is a junior at Paier College of Art in Hamden and a 2005 graduate of Newtown High School. She has been taking photographs since she was a sophomore at NHS, fulfilling an art requirement. “I knew right away that I wanted to do this the rest of my life,” said Ms Werner. “I made the decision to go to school to study photography by my junior year.”

She has photographed scenes in places as far away as Germany, Venezuela and Mexico, but these particular photographs are regional, she said. Some were taken at an abandoned prison farm colony on Staten Island, others in various spots throughout Connecticut and New York.

All of the photographs in the Mocha show were taken during the past year, and while some are portrait studies she had to do at school, the majority of the eleven photos revolve around a passion for photographing abandoned buildings and sites that Ms Werner has recently developed.

“I like to turn broken down things into art,” said Ms Werner, “things like abandoned buildings, especially. About a year ago I was looking at graffiti, then I saw some old, broken down barns that I was attracted to, and I think it all sort of triggered something in me. Each place has such a history.”

She is particularly intrigued by the Staten Island farm colony. The buildings are all covered in graffiti now, but rather than conveying a feeling of desolation, the graffiti lends a sense of another layer of architecture, particularly in one photograph taken by Ms Werner where 2 am shadows mingle with faded scrawls across the brick facade.

In an abandoned manufacturing building she discovered along Route 69, specks of light stream through cracks in the ceiling, filling the black and white photograph with a sense of motion and life that is no longer there.

“I’m drawn to this stuff, because I like to photograph the truth of things,” Ms Werner said.

She develops her own photos in the lab at Paier College, playing with the quality of the light and color until they reveal her messages.

“I love the whole process of photography, though, the ideas, taking the pictures, and developing them,” said Ms Werner. “Ideally, I would like to just keep finding abandoned buildings and taking picture, but I don’t think there’s a living in doing that. I would love to be a travel photographer, too. I don’t like staying in one place.”

“Urban Exploration” will be on display at Mocha through November 1.