New England Ruins: Photographs of the Abandoned Northeast

Rob Dobi has been photographing abandoned places in the Northeast since 1999 when he was a student at RISD. The wonderment and discovery of the experience never wanes for Dobi and there really isn’t one specific type of building or space that inspires him more than another, mainly because the rush of stepping into a place where you don’t know what to expect never gets old. His photographs include those of iconic places, asylums school house, churches, factories, and abandoned homes in the middle of nowhere. He tries to document as much of a place as he can, with a good amount of wide shots that define the space as well as seeking out things one might not normally encounter. Sometimes the most interesting finds are the things others might look over, like a doodle on a sheet of paper, or some hidden patient scrawl on a brick. The collection of photographs, accompanied by short essay, evokes feeling of loss and nostalgia, but also rouses the imagination about those New England days now long in the past.