Before a building or town decays into the Romanticised, ivy clad ruin that we associate with the idea of the ruined town, there is an intermediate stage, the formation of the archaeological ruin.

There's a genre of photography that captures the decay we see around us in the run-down, dilapidated parts of the towns that we live in, showing the process of decay. Yet, this does not have the same appeal for the majority of us as the romanticised ruin. Harbison points out that "Ordinary litter, such as accumulates in certain spots which are neither city nor country, or in streets where the garbagemen are on strike, is formally similar, but does not cause the same pleasure as the more hygienic rubbish of the classical sites..." (Harbison, 107).

Although most of these images concern individual buildings or areas of ruin, there are examples of whole towns that people have abandoned. A striking example is Pripyat in Ukraine, within the thirty mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Once a showcase town, where no expense was spared to house the Soviet Union's nuclear energy workers, the town quickly fell into disrepair and then ruin after its evacuation.

Pages in this category:

• Modern Ruins Pictures
• Pripyat
• The House I Once Called Home

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