Now that is a different idea.
Wow...I feel like this could be very powerful....
I think that places can pick up the atmosphere of incidents that happened at that location.
Kind of like a recording. Maybe there is no actual ghost there, but the occurance may have left a troubling of the air, and the right person, or receiver can pick it up.
Ghosts are possible as well, but they more likely are a shell left by the person, and not the consciousness or actual being that has gone on to take care of their business elsewhere.
Tim Powers has explored this theme in many of his books. His series "Fault Lines" is a good example.
I read a lot of literature in this area, and still have come up with no difinitive answer.
What about you? Have you picked up any feelings or seen any "recordings" in this project?
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>Have you picked up any feelings or seen any "recordings" in this project?
not a thing. but it's made me realize that someone probably died just about everwhere.
only in places that the spirit existed in for a longer than moment or day length of time . like a hospital or house or workplace. but battlefields and street corners not so much. you know how if you close your eyes and you can see a room in your house or cubicle office? but its harder to remember a transient location. I have been in a few houses that definately had some spiritous residou left in there. but also maybe a basement where someone was kept captive for a length of time and then murdered. What about those highway markers where crashes that claimed lives decorated with roses and crosses etc. never do i get the notion anything was left behind. HEY thatd be an ineresting photo book since its a somewhat new phenom that people make little memoriums on the sides of roads , highways, in all 50 states . kinda has a gothy flair to it
I agree. Your photos are powerful, as is the subject matter. It would be an excellent book, as well as a nice way to remember those people. (Deleted comment)
I kind of know what you're talking about here - I've started to walk down a street and just turned around and gone a different way because something about that block felt wrong. It's a really unsettling feeling.
This is very painful. What made you start this one?
I've been dwelling on the question of ghosts and hauntings for all my life, and more seriously in the last few months. So much so that I'm thinking of going on paranormal investigations, just to try to answer questions in my own heart. I sit up in bed in the dark in absolute terror, wondering what will happen to my soul when I die. I don't know if there's a quantifiable answer, but at least I can look.
Oh...and Vlad worked with the mother of my then-best-friend, Noriko. Her mother was devastated at the loss-- he was more than a coworker. He'd become a family friend. It was staggeringly senseless.
... not only of the wronged... but any place where great emotion (pain or joy) has been spent. I feel it often in old theatres -- this energy or potential force.
we had a theater in my hometown that was supposed to be haunted, then the paper dug up a story that a jetliner had crashed nearby and the county morgue was out of space for the huge influx of dead and used the theater attic for temporary storage(why the attic no idea) . It was the theater i saw Star Wars for the first time.
i just finished giving a presentation on 1910-1939 concentrating on the murders of the time.
mainly serial murder, but still.
i sent the professor a link to your project.
as always, your work is wonderful.
swank. it's at the point where i'm trying to figure out whether it's done or not.
not murders in philadelphia by any chance? i'd love to find the locations of some earlier ones.
is that the body in this photo?? or another one or a ghost??? its freakin me out man!
That's probably a homeless person. See the "mattress" and "sheets" and box a bit further back?
The most recent murder around Suburban Station/15th street was allegedly between two drug dealers arguing about whose shift it was to sell to the homeless. There have been others - homeless on homeless, and a random out-of-no-where stabbing.
Gorgeous and haunting stuff, Kyle. One of the pictures had the wrong date in the title, though. The title was listed as 2007 and you wrote the murder occurred in 2006. Of course I can't remember which one now.
i love that you did them all in black and white. they are more powerful that way, somehow. this is such a great idea.
This is really powerful stuff.
I have a list of murders of sex workers around the world (I had ideas about putting together a memorial website, but I've pretty much shelved the plan) and I took a look at it to see if I'd included any in Philadelphia, just in case you're interested. I found two:
1 August 2005: Ashley Burg, 17, murdered by David Francis Downey, Philadelphia
3 February 2006: Brandon "Alexis" King, 21, transgendered, shot by Terron Oates
any idea where they were killed?
Gettysburg, Normandy, Shiloh, Iwo Jima and the like tend to have a resonance with people because we've been indoctrinated to have a response. "THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PLACE WHERE IMPORTANT THINGS HAPPENED" and for some of us the feelings are real. For others? Not so much. But without any sort of context it would just be another place.
Places don't have memories - people do. I find this to be more encouraging and interesting than the idea that a hunk of rock or dirt can hold something so ephemeral as a memory. It means that people, people that care, can pass a memory down for generations upon generations stretching back thousands of years. It means that there is somethng so universal about that memory that it still touches us in a way that shows the continuity of the human experience across time, langauge, and culture. I think that is fascinating.
Cool -- and morbid -- idea. It's interesting to consider why they would hold such fascination for some of us. They are (very good) photos of "empty" spaces. It's about the idea of what happened there. Doing them in black and white magnifies their Creep Factor; it's as if all the "blood" has been drained. I find this one especially creepy. | 
