Photographer Highlights Beauty in Abandoned Places

John Plashal speaks to a crowd at Piedmont Arts

Humans are obsessed with a sense of place.

That’s how photographer John Plashal opened his talk on the many abandoned places he has photographed throughout Virginia at an art talk held at Piedmont Arts on Thursday.

Plashal presented more than 30 photographs of abandoned houses, churches, schools, secret societies, libraries and restaurants, all which he compiled for his coffee table book entitled, A Beautifully Broken Virginia.

Looking at the lilting facades and crumbling interiors – some of which are still fully furnished and stand waiting, as if for time to restart – one wonders, how did Plashal find such abandoned gems?

"I like doing it the good old fashioned way,” Plashal said. “By knocking on people's doors.” When approaching neighbors of such derelicts he tells them, "I’m enamored with this place can you tell me anything about it?” And nine times out of ten he finds himself sitting at a kitchen table with a piece of pie "and they’re telling me all about it."

Plashal was drawn to the pictured house because of its Victorian architecture

When Plashal first began photographing abandoned buildings, he found himself seeking places, drawn by their architecture, but not doing any more than photographing their exteriors.

The buildings were frozen in time, seemingly saying,"Welcome to Virginia's world of abandonment. Welcome to the afterworld,” said Plashal.

But over time, he began to wonder what treasures lay inside these monuments to the past.

“The first time I was brazen enough to go in one of these places, I found prescription eyewear, jewelry, cash – almost 50 years later,” he mused. “And this place was abandoned in December of '69.”

"How do I know that?” he asked the crowd. “The calendar. Stuck up there above the kitchen plates, turned to December 1969." 

Plashal gestures to an old trunk in which he found a trove of forgotten love letters

Once, inside a house in Westmoreland County, Plashal found a chest full of love letters.

"I felt like I was invading these people's privacy,” he recalled. But he has continued his search, because, he said, "these places deserve to be commemorated. They are full of memories."

In other houses, Plashal has found diaries, wedding albums, toys and pianos.

"Every house had a piano. You’d be surprised how many of these pianos I’ve found,” he quipped.

In one house, he found the uniform and gear of a World War II veteran neatly displayed in a long-forgotten attic.

Once Plashal began entering these houses and finding furnishings and belongings left inside, slowly being reclaimed by nature, he knew he had to learn more about the people who once lived in these homes.

“I just hit another junction,” he said. "I needed to know about these places and the people who lived there.”

Plashal shows a photograph of the childhood home of Charles Johnson of Essex County

At a talk at a retirement home in Essex County, Plashal recounted, he told the story of a house he had found particularly intriguing. “I couldn’t find anything about the house,” he said. So, he went next door and asked a neighbor if she had any information about who used to live there.

The woman told him that she knew the house was once owned by the Johnson family and that Mrs. Johnson claimed to make the best coconut pie in Virginia. 

During Plashal's story, an elderly man in the front row began to clutch his chest and cry. Thinking he was having a medical emergency, Plashal asked if the man needed help. The man’s nephew, who was sitting beside him, told Plashal “Everything’s OK. He’s just having an emotional response, because that is his childhood home."

“There was a collective ‘ah’ from the crowd,” said Plashal.

The man turned out to be Charles Johnson, the son of the Mrs. Johnson in Plashal’s story. When Plashal asked if someone in that house made a great coconut pie, Mr. Johnson said, “Yes. I know because I was the one helping her crack the coconuts. She was my mother.”

Charles Johnson (left) and John Plashal

After the talk, Plashal accompanied the 95-year-old Mr. Johnson and his 69-year-old nephew to dinner where they talked for hours and looked at pictures of Johnson’s childhood home.

"So many precious memories die with our elders,” said Plashal. “It’s up to us to get these stories out."

That’s why Plashal suggests, “Always take back roads. Take the longest possible way through back roads.” If you do, you just might find a new sense of place.

John Plashal’s talk was presented by Piedmont Arts and is part of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Speakers on the Arts program, available to Statewide Partners of the VMFA. This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is supported, in part, by the Paul Mellon Endowment and the Jean Stafford Camp Memorial Fund.