Out of Service: Abandoned infrastructure in the United States

My name is Jeff, and I am a hobbyist documentary and street photographer based in the suburbs of NYC.  I love shooting the streets of NYC and other cities I travel to.  I can go out day after day and get nothing, but all it takes is being in the right place and the right time to get that memorable shot that makes it worth it.  One particular challenge I enjoy is when I am visiting a city for work and I only have maybe an hour or two of downtime to shoot, I like trying to capture the essence of a city in that short period of time.

I was always interested in photography as a kid, but didn’t get my first real camera until my daughter was born, a Canon Rebel 60D.  Like many people, I eventually abandoned that camera for the convenience and portability of an iPhone.  However, I felt a creative hole in my life that I wanted to fill, and in early 2025 I discovered the Fujifilm X100VI.  I have since acquired a Fujifilm X-T5 with several favorite lenses (especially the Fuji XF35mm f1.4), and the Leica Q3 43.  In terms of which one I use, for portability, the X100VI is in my bag in Manhattan every single day, and has been with me to 10 countries.  For versatility, I love my X-T5, and in particular the rendering of the XF35mm f1.4 is magical.  For sharpness, low light, and just overall incredible rendering, you just can’t beat a Leica, so I often pair it with my X-T5.

I hadn’t really thought of the documentary aspect of photography until I did a workshop earlier this year with The Raw Society in Marrakesh.  Working with Jorge Delgado-Urena, I learned so much about not only composition and framing, but pairing and sequencing of images, and how to tell a story using my camera.  While I brought several cameras on that trip, I ended up just using the X100VI because of its small size yet high image quality and versatility.

While I shoot RAW only on my Leica Q3 43 and edit in post, I generally love the JPEGs that come out of my Fujis and almost always just set a recipe and make minor tweaks in post.  This was the case in Marrakesh, where I took about 1000 photos all using the Kodak Portra 400 recipe from Fuji X Weekly.  Following this workshop, I started several documentary projects, all of which I am sharing via Substack.  I like the flexibility of the platform to allow for longer-form storytelling and really weaving photos and text together into a cohesive whole.

My abandoned infrastructure series began just as a trip to take some pictures of the old abandoned Glenwood power station in Yonkers, NY.  Following that trip, I started doing some research and realized how widespread these abandoned infrastructure sites were throughout the US.  I view my role in this two fold – firstly, I think as technology moves forward rapidly, I want to make sure someone is documenting what we have left behind from a simpler time.  Additionally, I’m totally blown away by the quality of the street art, and while I don’t know the artists behind it, I like to document their work.

Access to the sites can be very tricky.  Many of them are fenced off and can be both dangerous and illegal to enter.  So I am extremely careful to ensure what I am doing is safe.  But I also look to balance that with what I feel is a very legitimate need to document these old sites before they are gone.  Often there is a lot of information to be found on both the history and access to these sites on the web, Reddit, Google Maps, etc.  This is generally the one place in my work where I’m ok using AI tools like Claude, as they can quickly help gather background reading on the history of a site.

Going forward, I have a number of documentary and travel projects planned, and I absolutely hope to do more workshops with the Raw Society. As much as I love my Leica and plan to continue using that and film cameras, the heart of my photography practice is with my Fujifilm cameras, as the small size and great image quality straight out of camera support my workflow, but they are just fun cameras that make me want to shoot.

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