New York Times Irish Ghost Town Special

It’s basically ‘Bleak Irish Holiday Snaps’ with a fancy camera.

From the New York Times:

Every year, the Irish-Swiss artist Valérie Anex visits her grandmother in Ireland. Every year, the area looks a little different. New houses. New roads. Changed landscapes.

In 2010, while traveling in and around Roosky, a small village on the River Shannon, Ms. Anex, 27, noticed a number of empty houses. All of them were new; all of them “waiting for somebody to come.”

Communities in Ireland where more than half of homes are vacant or incomplete are known as “Ghost Estates,” which is also the title of Ms. Anex’s haunting photo essay. The emptiness symbolizes the country’s degrading economic situation. But it goes beyond visual representation. The estates have had a very physical effect on the face of the open landscape.

“The crisis is something we should think about,” Ms. Anex said. She hopes to turn attention to a very simple question: How do things like this happen?

“One can hear the murmuring of the wind in the grass of the neglected lawns and from time to time a dog barking in the distance,” she writes in the introduction to her project. “Abandoned building sites stand in the surroundings, mounds of earth and all kinds of waste are strewn everywhere.”