Disclaimer: This article was published in 2023. Some information may no longer be current.
“This was somebody’s home, and somehow they lost their home,” said weekend photographer Michael Wade, 68, who has been documenting the nostalgic stories of abandoned buildings through his lens since 2018.
“That personally resonates with me greatly because I had to struggle so hard to keep my family from losing our home.”
The sunken roofs and sagging porches of the deserted houses he portrays—once elegant manners filled with laughter—bespeak of simpler times gone by. Meanwhile, haunting fronts of forsaken goods stores, once the thriving heart of a community, whisper of their owners’ lost dreams.
“That was somebody’s dream. What happened to it?” asked Wade.
Could internet shopping have rendered these rural businesses obsolete in the same way cell phone cameras shuttered his once-bustling photography portrait studio?
He would find out through his photo documentation, while also discovering that those lost dreams aren’t hopelessly lost. They just require re-finding.
Wade learned this after his parallel life led him to recapture his dream of being a photographer. “All art is in some way autobiographical,” said Wade, speaking of the forgotten buildings he photographs. “I see myself in them.”
Descending into Obsolescence
Wade’s photography career began 40 years earlier, taking Avant Garde portraits of punk rockers in a bar during the early 80s. That led to his shooting for the Chrysler Museum in Virginia before venturing out to open his own portrait studio. He was making six figures.
Life was good.
But technology caught up and drove his gradual descent into obsolescence—much like the buildings he now devotes his off hours to documenting.
The smartphone was introduced, landing a camera in the hands of pretty much everyone.
“The cell phone that can take photographs did to professional photography what Netflix did to Blockbuster Video,” Wade said wryly.
“It used to be that only the Pharaoh had his story documented. Now 13-year-old kids on TikTok are getting his life documented.”
Wade watched despondently as Kodak filed for bankruptcy. He looked on forlornly as portrait studios in Sears and Walmart shuttered their doors for the final time.
They were the “canary in the coal mine,” foreshadowing the direction of his future career path.
“By 2012, it was pretty much over,” he said. Pretty soon, he locked his studio door for the last time, too.
Like those whose deserted homes and businesses he photographs, Wade bade farewell to simpler times. He would likewise have to re-find or reinvent himself—somehow.
Thus at age 58, he worked 60-hour weeks at a shipping yard. Pushing 60, he attended college full-time.
He sold life insurance. And still does.
It paid the bills, but “literally working in a cubicle” all day wasn’t nurturing the soul.
But the three-day weekends with his office job afforded him time to spare.
“I started just wandering around, going out to the country more and more, and was attracted to these older, abandoned buildings,” he said. “I felt comfortable photographing them because nobody lives there. Nobody’s going to come out and say, ‘Why are you taking pictures of my home?’
“The more I started doing that, the more I started discovering the history and the story of these places.”
He would also discover a major reason for their decline.
Reclaiming the Dream
The freedom was intoxicating. Literally “wandering aimlessly” in his car, he would intentionally get lost down dirt roads in remote reaches of his home state of Virginia.
“A lot of times, I’ll pick a spot just for the name,” he said. “I’ve been to Frog Level, Little Hell, Hurtsville, and I just pick a place because the name sounds interesting.”
We sometimes don’t even think when we pass by a place—a lonely service station or general goods store becomes a lost fixture. They were places of vital importance.
“A lot of these places were the Walmart: the post office, the merchandise store,” Wade said. “These places were the heartbeat of the community. This is where you went to get your mail. This is where you sat down on a summer’s day, got a Coca-Cola, a bag of peanuts, and sat down with a guy in blue jean coveralls and talked about the weather, talked about politics, gossiped about the pastor. This was small-town life.”
So, what became of those simpler days? Wade believes both politics and technology had a hand in phasing them out.
While driving those dirt roads, he sees hardly a soul, but they’re not deserted.
“One of the things I see a lot of when I’m out riding around: UPS and Amazon and FedEx,” he said. “Because now, if you can access the internet, you don’t have to go down to Three Black Cats to get something ordered.”
And, lamenting the 2008 financial crisis’ sad recovery, he added with a nudge that “elections have consequences.”
Wade has traipsed to some 500 plots across the state and beyond. He has developed a “radar” for spotting their signature old red tin roofs “out of the corner of my eye, 65 miles an hour, a mile behind me,” he said.
Although he has now fully embraced digital—Wade professes he isn’t a “caveman”—he’s partial to the elegance of his antiquated 4×5 view camera, which looks a lot like an accordion.
He misses the craft. Film “slows you down” in a good way.
“There’s a certain elegance,” he said, adding with a laugh: “like driving a shift versus an automatic—but I still drive an automatic.”
Still, for years he clung to all those old negatives and sample photos—reminiscent of a once-burning artistic ambition now in ashes.
“It’s almost like a divorce, or death,” he said. “And you’ve finally come to a point where it’s like, ‘I need to move away from this, and I got to stop grieving.’
“This part of my life is over.”
Over, but not really over.
Somehow, Wade’s passion persists, and through it, the stories of the places he photographs persist, too.
He’s gotten more organized in his approach now. Wade’s plugged himself into a tight-knit community of fellow ghost town hunters, whom he turns to for GPS coordinates and Google Earth screen grabs on the fly or historical profiling—thanks to technology, ironically.
By posting his finds on Facebook, resources come flooding in from helpers who fill in the gaps in the story.
Wade has managed to locate surviving family members, such as grandchildren, whose ancestors once owned these places. He’s uncovered histories, some downright bloody and notorious.
Less haphazard in his approach, today Wade plans his journeys more deliberately, often with specific targets in mind.
But he’s not too careful.
“I do have a target destination,” he said. “But on the way back, I try to get lost as many times as possible.”
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