VOIDS
Anthology

"Voids" is a series dedicated to the quiet revelations of emptiness in urban spaces. Each space offers room for presence. In these spaces, nature quietly reclaims what was left behind, weaving life into the empty edges of our forgotten cities. Most of these were captured while road-tripping across the United States.

Between 2015 and 2019, I worked on a photo series that revolved around empty urban and industrial spaces across the United States and Italy: abandoned gas stations, forgotten motels in the middle of nowhere, and street corners where weeds quietly broke through cracked asphalt. These were not dramatic ruins or historical landmarks, but ordinary places left behind — the kind of spaces we usually pass without a second glance. Looking back, I realize that what drew me to them was not just their visual character, but the quiet tension they carried: man-made environments stripped of their purpose, standing somewhere between relevance and disappearance.

At the time, photography of abandoned or vacant spaces had become a sort of cultural current. The mid-2010s were full of images of brutalist buildings, empty malls, and concrete landscapes — often presented with an austere beauty that bordered on the romantic. Instagram was still young enough that aesthetics could define communities, and these images seemed to say something about our collective mood: a fascination with the forgotten, the raw, the imperfect. I suppose I was part of that wave, although I didn’t approach it as a stylistic exercise. For me, photographing these places was more about observing what happens when human intent fades away and nature (or simply time) begins to take over.

I was living between Italy and the U.S. then, and the contrasts were striking. In Italy, abandoned spaces often carried layers of history — a half-collapsed farmhouse in Veneto might have been standing since before my grandparents were born. In America, especially across the Midwest and Southwest, abandonment felt newer, more abrupt. A gas station might have been thriving twenty years earlier before the freeway shifted the traffic elsewhere. The emptiness felt fresher, like a recent wound rather than an ancient scar. Yet in both contexts, I found the same quiet poetry: places designed to serve human life, now existing without us.

There’s something profoundly philosophical about empty man-made spaces. They force us to think about value — not in the economic sense, but existentially. A building has value when it fulfills a function: shelter, commerce, entertainment. But what happens when that purpose is gone? Does the structure still have worth, or does it instantly become waste? The legal system still recognizes it as property, but morally, emotionally, it becomes harder to say who it belongs to. When a parking lot is overrun by weeds, when a motel keeps its sign lit but no longer expects guests, ownership feels like an abstraction. These spaces seem to slip into a neutral state — not yet reclaimed by nature, but no longer claimed by us.

During those years, I often thought about how photography itself gives temporary meaning to things that are otherwise overlooked. To photograph an abandoned gas station is, in a way, to return it to relevance. The act of framing it, of looking at it carefully, is a small gesture of respect. It doesn’t change the reality of its decay, but it rescues it, even if briefly, from invisibility.

The trend toward photographing brutalist architecture and empty spaces probably came from a similar desire. There was something comforting about stillness during that time — a search for quiet in an increasingly loud digital world. The 2010s were the years when social media began to reshape our sense of presence and attention. Every moment was documented, every place was crowded with commentary. Against that noise, the image of an empty concrete hallway or a deserted building felt almost meditative. It invited silence, reflection, and perhaps nostalgia for a slower, less mediated kind of world.

Brutalism, in particular, offered an aesthetic of honesty. Its rough surfaces and unapologetic geometry rejected the polished perfection we were surrounded by. Photographing these structures became a way to resist the artificial cheerfulness of modern design — a quiet rebellion through appreciation of the unadorned and the forgotten. My own images fit somewhere within that dialogue, though they were more concerned with the passage of time than with architectural theory.

When the pandemic arrived a few years later, the relationship between people and empty spaces changed dramatically. Suddenly, emptiness was no longer poetic — it was real, frightening, and everywhere. Cities that once hummed with life fell silent, and the imagery of deserted streets stopped feeling like metaphor. For a brief moment, we all lived inside the kind of photographs I had been taking years earlier. And when the world started to reopen, our fascination with emptiness seemed to fade. People wanted warmth, presence, connection — not another reminder of absence.

Looking at my old series now, I sense a quiet before the storm. Those photographs belong to a pre-pandemic world, when solitude and stillness could still be romanticized. Today, they feel almost prophetic — documents of a kind of emptiness we later experienced on a global scale. But they also remind me that emptiness isn’t always tragic. There’s a certain peace in decay, a slow reconciliation between human ambition and the natural world. When I revisit those places (some of which no longer exist) I’m struck by how gentle their disappearance feels. They’re not screaming for preservation; they’re simply fading, as all things do.

I often wonder whether these spaces should be saved or left to vanish. From a practical standpoint, many are privately owned or too costly to restore. Yet their quiet presence holds cultural value — not as landmarks, but as reminders of impermanence. In an age obsessed with progress and renewal, there’s humility in acknowledging that not everything must be rebuilt. Some places can simply be allowed to rest.

In the end, the series was as much about time as about space. Every photograph was a small act of witnessing — an attempt to hold onto something already disappearing. I never felt the need to stage or dramatize the scenes. The emptiness spoke for itself. A gas station with its lights still on, a motel pool filled with dead leaves, a cracked parking lot slowly turning into a field — these images carried their own quiet narrative.

When people look at the series today, they often describe it as nostalgic. I don’t entirely disagree, though nostalgia was never my intention. What I hoped to capture was not the past itself, but the moment when the present becomes history — when the usefulness of a place ends, but its presence lingers. In that in-between space, something oddly beautiful happens.

If there’s a lesson in those photographs, it might be about attention. Through the act of photographing them, I tried to listen — to give them a moment of acknowledgment before they disappeared completely. Back then, I saw them as symbols of neglect, of a world moving too fast and leaving things behind. Now I read them differently. They feel like reminders that silence and stillness have their own value — that not everything must be filled, optimized, or monetized.

When I pass by similar places today, I don’t always feel the urge to photograph them. Sometimes it’s enough just to notice them — to take in the light on a crumbling wall, the faint sound of wind through a broken window, the absence of human noise. That simple awareness feels like the continuation of the project, even without a camera. The act of seeing is still the same.

These places mirror the spaces we carry inside ourselves — pauses between one stage of life and another, moments of quiet before the next beginning. To recognize their beauty is, in a way, to recognize our own impermanence.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking the time to look, read, or even just scroll through. That means a lot. These pictures come from quiet places, and it feels nice to think someone out there spent a few minutes with them too. If you feel like writing, I’d honestly love to hear from you. Whether it’s about photography, places, or just life in general — I always enjoy chatting with people who stumble upon my work. You can drop me an email anytime.

Thank you for your visit, bye! :-)
hghg
.
.
.
.