About half of all marriages end up in ruins. A few start out that way.
For some couples, abandoned buildings — train stations, warehouses and century-old churches, often found in declining or deindustrialized cities — are proving the perfect haunting aesthetic for their weddings.
Call it a twist on something old, something new.
Sarah Budzowski Lentz, 27, a registered nurse, and Evan Lentz, 28, an accountant, chose to have their wedding reception in September 2017 along the banks of the Cuyahoga River, in a Cleveland neighborhood called the Flats.
The ceremony was in a church and the reception in a standard reception hall, “so we wanted to do something that was kind of unique for our photo,” said Ms. Lentz, who is from Independence, Ohio. The riverbank provided an opportunity to have photographs taken behind a gas station and strip club, near an area with abandoned warehouses and steel mills.
The setting was “kind of old, and destroyed, and crumbly,” she said, adding, “I thought it had a nice contrast: the formality of us with the background of something kind of forgotten.”
Her photographer, Allison Roche, who is based in Cleveland, estimates that about 15 percent of her clients “want to include something like ruins or abandoned spaces in their wedding images.”
Coordinating photos at these spaces, however, isn’t always easy. “Logistically one of the biggest issues is that a lot of these buildings don’t really have addresses anymore,” Ms. Roche said.
Ruins also change or sometimes disappear altogether. “Just because I shot there on Saturday doesn’t mean it’s going to look the same on Sunday,” she said.
And, there are other issues. Ms. Roche has run into squatters in some buildings. “I often bring my husband when it is somewhere I don’t know how comfortable I feel,” she said.
Neglected areas can eventually become hot real estate, part of an ongoing debate in many rapidly gentrifying formerly industrial areas as residents living near abandoned structures are pushed out from redevelopment. This method of gazing at such areas of a city, particularly in Detroit with tens of thousands of such structures, has often taken the label “Ruin Porn,” which this form of wedding photography can be categorized under. It’s a genre of photography which doesn’t always examine the larger social and economic forces taking place in cities. Still, the forlorn sense of isolation sparks curiosity for some couples, along with a desire to bring former functions back to abandoned structures, even temporarily, as a way to honor them.
Jesse Welter, of Motor City Photography Workshops, which is based in Royal Oak, Mich., said he found East Grand Boulevard Methodist Church several years ago for one couple who wanted to be photographed — and married — in the ruins. The 1910 church, which was used by several religious denominations over the years, was abandoned in 2000.
With developers snatching up sites that had been empty and crumbling for decades, Mr. Welter said, “it’s going to be harder to find abandoned churches.” And advance planning can be tricky. “Next year comes along and there’s no place to go get married now.”
One advantage to choosing abandoned buildings is “the venue is free,” he said, though this also comes with risks. Mr. Welter said he once received a ticket for trespassing in 2012 and had to pay a $200 fine, but more often he is just given a warning.
Some abandoned buildings do have an actual entry price, like the 16th Street Station in West Oakland, Calf., a former train station. The grand Beaux-Arts structure is owned by a firm affiliated with the nonprofit BRIDGE Housing Corporation, which builds affordable housing in Oakland. The 16th Street Station website describes, “a breathtaking majestic Main Hall, brick industrial space and gritty urban graffiti in one unusual package. The space is elegant yet raw, allowing you to use it as a blank but dramatic canvas.”
Clane Gessel, a San Francisco Bay Area photographer, said despite the venue’s $250- an-hour cost, at the time of his shoot there in October 2017, it looked “like a construction dump, like you should be wearing a hard hat.”
For Mr. Gessel and his clients, it was partly about the contrast between their outfits and the building’s condition. “Her dress is a custom-made Galia Lahav dress,” Mr. Gessel said, “which is also $30,000. And they wanted to take these clothes and shoot them among the ruins. And that was their thing, because they wanted that juxtaposition to show that even though they’re wearing these clothes they value the ruins that much.” More important, he said, the site choice honored the bride’s deceased father who once worked in the former train station.
Ruins offer the ethereal. Mr. Gessel described a favorite image of “the couple kind of silhouetted in front of a window. And all of that, the only reason you got the light ray is just because of the dust that was in there.”
Sodo Park, a once abandoned warehouse in Seattle and now an events space, has also become a favorite for Instagram-able photo shoots. “It’s the new trend where a lot of people are doing this because they want to get maybe a bit more different,” Mr. Gessel said. “I think that itself has taken on a vastly different meaning especially in light of social media.”
Dasha Sverdlova, 28, an asset manager for a real estate investment firm, and Taylor Mills, 30, a project manager for a tech company, chose to marry and have their reception in April 2017 on New York’s Governors Island. The couple, who live in Jersey City, N.J., use the surname Milova.
“We had been looking for abandoned churches and abandoned warehouses to get married, but unfortunately, most of the time they are not accessible, and definitely not accessible to our older grandparents,” Taylor Milova said. “So, we liked the fact that we had access to Governors Island with the full go-ahead to explore the island, go into all of these buildings, and kind of make the island our own.”
Their wedding was during the off-season, meaning they essentially had the island to themselves. Governors Island has a paid permitting process for weddings and other functions, including options to pay for additional ferry services to bring guests to the island. The Milovas paid $400 for the permit to use the Admiral’s House, and an additional $1,000 for ferry services, among other fees.
Dasha Milova, originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, explained that her family was “really into ruins, and liked to go sneak into abandoned hotels, and things like that.” She found herself lucky to fall in love with a transplanted Midwesterner with similar interests.
Governors Island “reflected our personalities,” she said. The couple had a permit for their wedding at the Admiral’s House, a structure that has previously hosted weddings but restricts access to its second floor. Through a friend who had once worked on the island and who was also a wedding guest, the Milovas entered other structures not open to the public.
Their photographer, Jake Murphy of the photography collective LOVE + WOLVES CO, which has offices in Brooklyn and the San Francisco Bay Area, said, “I love the vacant aesthetic, and the kind of like broken down feel of it.” Photographing in the “eerie vibe,” Mr. Murphy said, provided “an embarrassment of riches. I was like a kid in a candy store.”
At the same time, he said they had to avoid “weak flooring that could fall through,” reminding people, “don’t touch any wires, stay away from wire that’s exposed.”
“Lighting is definitely an issue that you have to work around, because you can’t just click the lights on, you have to create your own light, and be creative,” Mr. Murphy said, adding, “we had to open all of the emergency exit doors and like prop them open with garbage cans we found in the theater and let all of that light flow.” In another case, he said, “we even used the cellphone flashlights.”
While Governors Island is remote even to most New Yorkers, ravaged buildings abounded during the Bronx is Burning 1970s. That’s when Camilo José Vergara, a Chilean-born, New York-based photographer, got his start. Among Mr. Vergara’s favorite early images, he said, is a 1970 East Harlem wedding, a smiling bride with ruined structures all around.
What makes ruins photographing special, Mr. Vergara said, is the notion of change. “I love the sense a New York that doesn’t exist anymore makes.”
“The ruin has that kind of appeal, you’re looking for something lasting, which is sort of almost a contradiction because here’s a ruin that’s falling apart, yet at the same time, it’s seen as something sturdy,” Mr. Vergara said. “It’s suffered blows but it’s still there. They almost have a sacred feeling to them.”
Possibly, like the institution of marriage itself.
“Weddings are the beginning of something very new and beautiful and I think that the future of a marriage is always left to our imagination,” said Ms. Roche, the Cleveland photographer. “When I photograph a couple on their wedding day, I don’t know the state of their marriage, I don’t know what the future is going to look like. And I think the ruins and the abandoned spaces that I shoot in are often the exact inverse. They represent the end of something that once may have been beautiful, but their past is left for imagination.”
Her client Ms. Lentz noted the symbolism for her: “The ruins show that me and my husband had been together for a long time before I got married, where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. That no matter what is behind us, we’ll always be together.”
