Shaun O'Boyle has been consistently photographing modern industrial ruins across the United States--interpreting the present past, places and things that still exist, and in some cases, were still in use until quite recently but today are abandoned.

An example is Bethlehem Steel, one of the most powerful symbols of American industrial manufacturing leadership, which shut its doors for business in late 1995:

How are we to interpret these kind of industrial ruins? Ruins whose depredations are wrought by cycles of capitalist reconstruction which either obliterate buildings or render their contents and the activities which they house instantaneously obsolete, turning solid things and places into air.

Rather than a romantic aesthetic of ruins as archaic monuments, contemporary industrial ruins are more likely to epitomise a sort of modern gothic, part of a wider sentiment which emerges out of a ‘post-industrial nostalgia’, which focuses on ‘dark urban nightscapes, abandoned parking lots, factories, warehouses and other remnants of post-industrial culture’.

For a gothic sensibility, ruins possess the attraction of decay and death, and to enter them is to venture into darkness and the possibilities of confronting that which is repressed. Gothic interpretations usefully foreground continuities with the romantic tradition in which ruins rebuke scenarios of endless progress. Ruins always constitute an allegorical embodiment of a past, while they perform a physical remembering of that which has vanished,

Representations of dereliction echo through resurgent popular gothic cultural forms which espouse the idea that the structures of the modern world are falling down, a notion which extends to an envisioning of the city as a disaster zone. If industrial ruins question the persistent myth of progress, then the gothic is concerned with the disintegration of the ordered.

Gothic interpretations have connotations of gloominess and darkness, and tend to involve a wallowing in melancholia and sense of foreboding of dystopia.