A photographer has been capturing abandoned homes in Baltimore and the surrounding areas for the past 16 years — dodging ticks, copperheads, drug dealers, hunters with high-powered rifles, and farmers on ATVs.
Ben Marcin has documented crumbling row houses in the inner city that somehow survived the wrecking ball, to abandoned houses on the Eastern Shore, where the last generations of families either passed away or moved on after decades of farming the land. He’s also photographed temporary homeless camps in the city, none of which have ever survived for more than a year.
Marcin has curated his project for a debut photobook titled The Holdouts, which references a common real estate term that describes a property owner who refuses to sell a building or lot to a developer, thus greatly hindering the completion of a larger, community-based project.
“I either found them by the side of the road or stumbled upon them while hiking in the woods,” Marcin tells PetaPixel about how he discovered the properties. “It was important to show as much of the surroundings as possible in order to achieve a strong sense of isolation and context.”…