Ruins: Something to make you dream. Add poetry to a landscape.

So wrote Flaubert in 1850, a simple truth. How many times have we stopped to look at a decadent house, an abandoned place, imagining how it was in the past and seeing between the faded plaster and the broken jambs a sort of magic that survives time?.

It was from these very places that James Kerwin was captured.

Born in the town of Norwich, James became passionate about photography more than ten years ago, when, after purchasing his first camera, he let himself be transported by it to discover new places. After devoting himself to landscape photography, but also to photos of events and weddings, he was definitely fascinated by architecture. It was 2013, and since then he hasn’t changed his ways since, immortalizing the interiors and exteriors of the decadent buildings he encountered on his street, thus creating “Decadence“, his first series of abandoned buildings.

Among James Kerwin’s shots that stand out, most are those taken in Beirut, a city that after the Second World War experienced a period of prosperity that manifested itself mainly in the architectural style of the buildings that took up the European style, leading the capital of Lebanon to be nicknamed “the Paris of the Middle East”. This period of splendor, however, came to an abrupt end due to the outbreak of the Civil War, which literally destroyed entire cities.

It is here that James Kerwin found some of the buildings that appear in his photographs.

Find out more about James Kerwin on his site and on his Instagram profile!