Photography — Ryan Wood

A cracked concrete path running through an overgrown field of tall grass toward the low silhouette of the abandoned school and gymnasium, trees along the horizon — Back lawn

A sharp upward view of the corner of the school building against a deep blue sky, a single power line cutting across — Side of school

A long empty school corridor with lockers down the right wall, receding to a bright doorway at the far end — Hallway viewed from side door

Rows of upholstered auditorium seats seen through a window, with sunset sky and power lines reflected across the glass — School theater

Almost everything inside is shot from a threshold — through a window, through a broken pane, from a doorway. Partly that's access. Mostly it's that the barrier is the subject.

A white porcelain sink and exposed plumbing seen through a broken concrete-block wall opening into a derelict bathroom — View inside the mens bathroom

A close view of shattered safety glass, the spiderweb of cracks radiating from a single impact point against a dark interior — Shattered glass door

A bare dead branch holding several dried seed pods, silhouetted against a flat pale grey sky

A power line running diagonally past the eave of a low school building, an overgrown tree pressing against the windows below

Two flights of weathered concrete steps meeting at an inside corner, framed so the two flights appear to occupy the same plane — Escher stairs

A steep upward view along a band of gymnasium windows, teal and white painted panels catching the light — Window to gymnasium

The corner of a cream brick gymnasium against a cloud-streaked evening sky, small windows high on the wall — Gymnasium at sunset

A rusted steel column and downspout supporting a low awning, dead vines climbing the wall behind it — Awning of gym entrance

A dark brown metal door beside a band of blacked-out windows in a white painted school wall, weeds at the threshold — Side entrance to school

Two smeared handprints on a filthy window pane, the dark interior of a classroom barely visible behind the glass — Hand prints on a dirty window

The only direct evidence of a person in eighteen photographs.

Colophon

Sequenced, the pictures move from the far approach to the interiors and back out. The book closes on a numbered index of all eighteen captions and a line-drawn plan of the campus with a red dot at every camera position — the printed object, its spreads and its back matter, are on Print & Editorial.

Building that site plan changed which photographs survived. Once every frame had to be placed on a drawing of the campus, two of them turned out to be from a block away — a neighbour’s mailbox and a house across the street — and they came out of the book. They’re decent photographs. They weren’t photographs of this.

What I’d do differently is the interiors. Nearly all of them are shot from a threshold, and while the barrier is genuinely the subject, the honest version is that I never got inside. I’d also shoot a second visit in different weather; the whole book is overcast or golden hour, and the consistency flatters the sequence more than the place deserves.

Shot on a Canon EOS Rebel T3i, 18 frames selected from the semester’s shooting. Book is 11 × 8.5 in landscape, 30 pages, inkjet, spiral bound. Laid out in InDesign 18.1.