FOREWORD

“America is not a young land.” William Burroughs once said that, and he was right. America has been here for a long time. Not just the Natives who hunted mammoths across the land bridge. I’m talking about you and me, the Americans born in the twentieth century who are still here in the twenty-first. Our America has been here long enough to leave ruins behind.

Have you ever been to Detroit? You don’t even have to go to all the way to Eight Mile to see abandoned spray-painted middle-class houses stuffed with garbage bags and cast-off Christmas trees intersected with inhabited homes that have shiny mini-vans in the driveway and fresh-faced kids staring at you through the window.

America in decline.

Seph Lawless, urban explorer and photographer extraordinaire, is intimately familiar with the America that we have left behind. Maybe you’ve seen the ruins of our former selves, or maybe you’ve only seen it through his photos, but here they are. He started with the profoundly titled Autopsy of America, an exquisite book of photos of abandoned shopping malls. With artistic intuition and masterly technique, this Gonzo photographer penetrated places that we didn’t even know were there.

Lawless grew up going to his local shopping mall in Cleveland. Remember when we used to see shopping malls as permanent staples of American consumer culture? We took them for granted. Or, if you were an eighties metalhead like me, we rejected them as vacuous end-products of human evolution. George Romero understood this when he used a shopping mall as the setting for his 1978 zombie apocalypse masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead.

“What are they doing here?” says one survivor, while looking from the terrace of the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania choked with zonked-out zombies in disco-era shopping attire. “Why do they come here?”

“Some kind of instinct,” says another survivor in SWAT gear. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

Lawless conveys in his photos not just an invitation to a post-apocalyptic place we haven’t been to, but a window into a place we used to go and left behind. And we didn’t know, when we walked away, that it would ever turn into America in decline.

Which bring us to Lawless’s next book. What’s the subject this time? Abandoned amusement parks fallen into ruins, leaving behind the skeletons of roller coasters and grinning clowns perched on giant tea cups in the middle of the forest. As a former barker, vendor, and roustabout for Ringling Brothers and the Big Apple Circus, I find this fascinating.

I met Lawless while I was reporting for CNNMoney and working on my own book, Circus Jerks. I must say, he beat me at my own game. Where does he find these weed-choked wonder rides in the middle of nowhere? That’s his talent.

Of all the phantasmagoric freak house bizarrities that Lawless captured with his camera, my personal favorite is the Land of Oz. As an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, I spent a lot of time wandering the hills of North Carolina. But never did I ever stumble across a sunset-dappled hilltop with a meandering yellow brick road bordered by goblin-faced trees that looked like they could “pick something off of you,” as that angry tree said to Dorothy when, you know, she picked his apple.

I would like to go to that place. But is it still there? We’ll have to ask Seph Lawless. Only he knows where to find these abandoned bits of Americana.

And they are fleeting.

Aaron Smith
CNN Journalist
February 2017