For many, abandoned buildings hold keys to the past. They are places frozen in time- authentic, eerie, and intriguing all in the same. Photographer and mixed media artist Samuel Quinn is one willing to break laws and trespass property in order to explore and capture these deserted wonders. In 2008, while in the South Shore driving his friend home, Quinn passed an eye-catching abandoned white house that stood lifeless in between two simple suburban homes. Two years later, in need of a new project, he traveled back to the house and began taking photographs for his portfolio A Houses Echo, which, as he describes, holds “portraits of a family who once lived in a house. A house…show more content… She looks to be from the 1950s or ‘60s, and she wears a light blue sweater that matches the background. Light blue can also be seen in the far upper right corner, on the side of the slanted ceiling, which balances the photograph. An old radiator heater rests on mustard yellow carpet below the two frames and portrait on the wall to the left. At the lower end of the image the mustard carpet has been peeled back towards the foreground, revealing its blue underside and the white matting that lay below. The color scheme is made up of both warm and cool colors, consisting of less saturated browns, yellows, blues, and greens. Vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines make up the corner of the room, and the frames form a pattern of rectangles. The peeled back carpet forms two isosceles triangles making a square at the bottom center of the picture. Similar to the amount of space in “Untitled 1”, it is clear that the space in “Untitled 5” is fairly limited.
The principle elements and details described above are essential, however the photographic elements of the prints also contribute greatly to how they are perceived. Both shots were taken with a 4 x 5 monorail view camera. The format of these works is large enough to provide a clear representation of being at the scene, but small enough to give viewers a feeling of home. All of the objects are stationary in both photographs. They appear sharp; meaning the depth of field was not too shallow. However, knowing
