The Urban Romance of Sean Galbraith
by John Spizzirri

They call it urban exploration. “They” are photographers with an eye, a curiosity and an appreciation for abandoned sites, documenting what Sean Galbraith calls the life cycle of inanimate objects. By day, Galbraith is a land use planner in the municipal law section of a large Toronto law firm. After hours, he perpetrates what the law calls recreational trespassing and he refers to as guerilla industrial archaeology.

It’s a hobby he started several years ago after moving back to Toronto from Tampa, Fla. It’s an extension of the urban street life images he’d been taking for half a dozen years.

But these images are not so overt.

“This is going into spaces that are technically off limits and documenting the places that nobody else wants to or even thinks of documenting,” he says. “They’re important links to our recent past, but most people think, ‘Well, it’s just as an old factory. Of what importance is that?’”

Many of the sites Galbraith shoots were once living, thriving entities—the main workplace for an entire town or large industry, employing thousands of people, many of whom may have worked much of their lives there.

All these places have stories to tell, he says. At the old Bethlehem Steel site in Lackawanna, N.Y., one of his favorite places to photograph, there rests in the rubble and decay important links to historical events like the Manhattan Project and the history of the steel industry.

From an artistic viewpoint, Galbraith admires the structure, lines, the forms and patterns, the replication that occurs throughout these monolithic structures.

“Usually these spaces have surprisingly incredible light, and the interplay of light and shadow in these buildings that are completely decayed and falling apart is really quite compelling,” he says. And the bigger the better. Among his favorite places to shoot are the industrial wastelands like Bethlehem, replete with glass furnaces and coke ovens, pump houses and boiler rooms, and an office building and chemical lab circa the 1930s.

Once a 1,300-acre site, portions of Bethlehem are in the throes of demolition and soil remediation in preparation for a multi-use redevelopment. Some 40 acres of a former slag dump now support the eight wind turbines of the Steel Winds wind energy farm.

Other favorites include the Don Valley Brickworks in Toronto (now being redeveloped into a cultural center), the Church of the Transfiguration in East Buffalo and the Hearn Generating Station in Toronto. Galbraith has been returning to Hearn regularly for a year and a half, documenting it in various stages of demolition.

“It was an environmental nightmare in there. They cut all the hoses and just let everything drain out.”

Once cleaned up, the site will house the Portlands Power Centre, a new power generating facility, and possibly a film production complex.

“It’s like the Phoenix, it has to burst into flames and ashes so that it can be reborn,” says Galbraith. One of the more risky aspects of urban exploration is slinking in and out of these sites undetected. Rarely do the photographers seek permission to shoot these multihazard sites. Often it is difficult to find the right person to ask and in today’s litigious society, rarely would the authorities agree to such a foray, Galbraith says.

“Sometimes it’s as easy as going through a fence or hopping a fence. Sometimes there’s a hole in the wall and you walk right in.” Recently, he and fellow members of the DK Photo Group, a photographers’ collective, used this all-access approach to take a film crew from the cable show “Behind the Camera” into the Don Valley Brickworks for a beginner’s lesson on urban exploration. (Look for the show on Dish Network’s Gallery HD in early 2008.)

Now they’re hoping to push the process one step further, taking the show on a tour of the world’s best abandoned sites.

“We’ve done our research and there’s some amazing stuff out there,” Galbraith says.

He got a taste of international urban exploration this past July while honeymooning in Paris.

“My wife was quite kind enough to give me the night off to explore the catacombs under Paris with a local French explorer,” he admits. “It’s such a unique experience, the tunnels and the hand-carved notes in the walls by the engineers who made these quarry tunnels back in 1702.”

A little crazy? Perhaps. But that is dedication to art. That is true urban romanticism.