A portal into another life: Photographing America’s abandoned homes

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — The houses are worn by weather and time, photographed in isolation like forgotten monuments. They have a haunted feel: Windows are boarded on Victorian-era turrets; paint flakes off the towering composite columns of a once-grand portico; wraparound verandas, perhaps once host to evening nightcaps and slow Sunday mornings, are barren. Walls crumble, roofs collapse, and greenery reclaims them.

For a decade, the New York-based photographer Bryan Sansivero has sought out forgotten, dilapidated homes across the United States — each with its own story to tell. Inside deserted clapboard farmsteads, palatial Antebellum-era plantation houses and maximalist Queen Anne-style structures, Sansivero has discovered many residences that were never emptied, offering a portal into another life.

Musty libraries are filled with books, papers and photographs; in one, a nearby coffee mug sits unretrieved. Grand pianos and half-full liquor bottles collect dust, while colorful children’s playrooms scattered with toys are unsettlingly idle. The images come together in his latest book, “America the Abandoned: Captivating Portraits of Deserted Homes.”

“It’s about capturing these time capsules; these lost places,” he explained in a phone call. “I like the mystery of not knowing what you’re going to find.”

Sansivero has documented abandoned spaces since he was a film studies major in college, starting out with the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, a disused psychiatric hospital in Long Island that served as the setting for his documentary thesis.

Over time, he found himself drawn to private residences — millions of which are abandoned across the country — especially as urban exploration, or “urbex,” became a highly monetized form of social media content that has become what he likens to a competitive sport. Abandoned hospitals, churches and schools are easy to find; houses, on the other hand, have a sense of discovery.

“If you go viral, you can get two million likes and hundreds of thousands of followers, and people are trying to chase that,” he said, saying it becomes about “the most views, the biggest and the best and all of that.” Instead, Sansivero has reacted in opposition, opting for the slow and deliberate methodology of medium-format film — though he does still post his images to more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. “For me, I’ve just been going backwards. I want to shoot more film. I want to shoot less digital, with an emphasis on using older, unique equipment.”

That doesn’t mean the homes Sansivero finds have been untouched since they were inhabited. Many have been destroyed or vandalized, perhaps by squatters, teenagers or the urbex set. Occasionally, he’s gotten a tip on a house only to find it filled by other photographers and content creators racing to be there first.

But often, he finds houses by chance, or with help from Google Earth, taking weeklong trips to the South or Midwest to areas impacted by the loss of industry or other economic or environmental pressures.

His treks come with risks — he’s inhaled mold (and now carries masks), his leg has gone through a decaying floor, and he’s felt the uneasy sway of a home seemingly near collapse. Yet he’s been undeterred, drawn to dramatic architecture and eccentric or historical collections, such as a room stacked high with vintage dollhouses, mannequins populating a house like ghosts, or interiors still decorated for a Christmas of the distant past.

“I can find a dozen or more houses exploring in a day and not want to photograph anything, because it’s an empty shell or it’s been trashed — it’s not telling a story about the previous owner,” he said. “I’m interested in what happened, why it was left like this.”

Sansivero researches the houses he photographs to whatever extent he can, but in “Abandoned America,” he shares limited details, giving a sense of who lived there but anonymizing them, avoiding social media’s instinct to exploit or exhaust a tragic story. Among the homes he has discovered are former respective residences of a local politician, an important fashion and textile designer, and a Pulitzer-Prize winning author. In one house, filled with life-sized mannequin mermaids, he found a disturbing published account that told the tale of a serial killer with victims in the basement, he recounted. The mermaids’ origins remain unknown.

The photographer found that former residence by chance when he was with a friend on the road; the boarded-up brick property by the highway was unmissable. “We were just driving down the highway, and I was like, ‘Oh, look at that house.’”

Lately, Sansivero has set his sights overseas, exploring chateaus and castles in Europe whose histories can stretch back much further in time. “America the Abandoned” may be a cap on a decade-long exploration of US homes, but it’s likely more a pause than an end to the work. After all, as Sansivero noted, with time, there will always be more to discover.

Images: Excerpted from “America the Abandoned: Captivating Portraits of Deserted Homes” © 2025 Bryan Sansivero. Used with permission from Artisan. All rights reserved.

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