Lost Places – the morbid charm of Europe

“I warmly welcome you to a journey through Europelike you have never experienced before. I will take you to places from a forgotten time that I have tracked down across Europe and beyond in order to capture them photographically for eternity. The images collected here are part of an ongoing project that began in 2019.”

This is how unctuous greetings usually sound when you walk through a fair or a fair: Come in, come in! But these inviting words (above) come from the author and photographer Sven Fennema, who also lives out his penchant for nostalgia and forgotten places in his seventh illustrated book. In his most recent book “Forgotten Splendor. Silent Witnesses of the Past – Lost Places in Europe” he traveled our continent from Scotland in the west to Georgia in the east and from Poland in the north to Italy in the south.

The buildings that the Westphalian native discovered and photographed on his travels share the same fate: they stand more or less forgotten in the middle of nowhere and are almost all abandoned. They were once magnificent buildings and are now languishing; in some, nature has already taken back what the architecture had once taken over. Nevertheless, they all exude a very special charm, in their individual construction and in their sometimes still bright colors.

Like the film sets by the American director Wes Anderson, the places photographed by Fennema take us into a world with a special aura. As “broken” as some things may be, the Lost Places still seem so homely and livable – that’s deceptive, of course, but it still triggers a certain longing. The photographer does not use artificial light in his photographs, which gives his images a special authenticity.

The captions for the photos are written by the author and taken from the book.

This article contains so-called affiliate links. Further information are available here.