Author Description

A patina of a ghostliness imbues all abandoned towns with the same melancholy ache; whether they be a stereotypical cowboy western town in the American west or a once-thriving port town in Belgium. Once inhabited, and now deserted and set to ruin, they inevitably foreshadow a post-apocalyptic future; or for the less dramatically inclined, they intimate some measure of failure. Photographer Virginia Mayo's exquisitely composed and lush black and white images capture the decay and destruction of Doel, a port town in Belgium with a dwindling population. The authorities want to raze Doel to rebuild it into something shiny, industrial, and new; but in the meantime, it's a ghost town inhabited by a few lonely souls who stubbornly refuse to leave or to take comfortable apartments elsewhere: they are deeply rooted trees who will not be easily shifted to some other patch of earth. In English and Flemish.