Harty House

Over the Easter holidays, I'd gone on a location shoot with Mr. Grigsby to a house I came across on the internet. A friend of mine had placed some photos on facebook of a house her father used to play in when he was a child. However, when they had revisited this place, they discovered the building had come under some serious wear and tear over the years. In fact its fair to say, the majority of it had collapsed and was deemed as unsafe.

Unsafe, yes i did say that, but that didn't stop me and Dan hunting out the place on the Isle of Sheppey (known for its class - NOT) and taking some photographs. This was for a music project, but the images are defiantly worth posting up on here as visual reference to a destroyed building as well as interiors which are worth considering. The lighting is something i also like in these shots which we might be able to incorporate in our own project.

All analog pictures were taken by me and the digital images by Dan on my SLR:

Shot depicts examples of rubble dotted around one of the houses' rooms

Looking above - holes, patchy ceiling but a great example of light leaks from the damaged structure

Windows - glass is shattered, only part of the windows that remain are the framework now accompanied by barbed wire to stop people getting into the house (oops)
Welcome - the scene entering the front door of the house, which literally is a welcome matt on the floor. Example of extreme ceiling damage, rubble as well as the floor which has collapsed.

Up close and personal - the layers of the walls which have started to separate from one another. Another look at the extent of the damaged floor and walls.


Good example of how the light leaks through a damaged structure, nice highlights and shadows depicted here
It was amazing to see the extent of the damage that had occurred to the building, and yet how it still remained intact in terms of differing rooms. This room in particular had lost the majority of the roof, hence the beautiful light flooding in onto the walls on the right. Structure comes complete with bear.

A closer look at the destroyed roof

Another example of a decaying room. Even after we'd left we'd caused more damage to the building as the floor caved in under mine and Dan's feet (basically where the huge hole is over by the far wall) The wallpaper emphasizes the grimy/decaying quality. This room has excellent examples of cracked walls and plaster.




I love the lighting in this shot. There's such a high contrast between the shadows and lit areas (which i find you get more of if you experiment with film rather than digital) It would be great to transfer some of the lighting from this into our final piece. When collated along with the adopted John Virtue style I feel we could have a very high quality final product which conveys our post apocalyptic theme
Here are some digital shots photographed by Dan. You do lose some of the lighting but these are great for referencing the whole of the building:

Exposed electrics, wires, taps, you name it the house literally stripped down to its bare necessities. 
A close up of the cracked plaster



Mouldy brickwork indicating the damage from the weather where damp has gotten in to the structure. Natural elements also add to the decay/modification to the structure




Exposed beams - elements that hold together the structure but are usually hidden remain the lasting features after the years of ruin
Brilliant shot for depicting the extreme state of the floors the building had. You literally had to play hop scotch to find a safe bit of flooring.

The trip to Harty House (as named by myself and Dan) was a great experience at seeing the extreme state a decaying building could get. As we didn't know the story of the building or know exactly what each of the rooms were, it was great to see the kind of stories our minds were coming up with at what could have happened here. The ambiguous nature of this place made our creative minds race ideas. Ok we were a bit naughty sneaking on in, but that's the risk we took I suppose and I don't regret it when I have a fantastic set of photographs that I can use a reference for projects like this. Hopefully these will prove beneficial in some way in terms of lighting as well as destroyed elements we can incorporate in our project.