Monday Moodboard: Seeking the Ghost of Beauty in Ruins

This coming weekend, I’ll be visiting and taking photos around the lonely ruins of the Manila Metropolitan Theater, something that I just noticed I’ve been doing every year.

You probably can’t tell that behind these lovely doors you’ll find decades worth of ruin and decay.

It has been two years since I first visited and entered the gloomy Manila Metropolitan Theater, an abandoned and decrepit theater that used to be Manila’s finest Art Deco gem. You would think that one tour around its rotting rooms and creepy corridors is enough, but somehow, I find that I keep coming back.

When you find yourself standing on crumbling concrete stairways, discarded wood, and rubble, you become aware of the poor state of the building you’re exploring.

As I’ve said in a post from last year, I used to mindlessly pass by this old building on my way to and from Manila. Sometimes, I’d stare at it and wonder what it looks like from the inside; other times, I’d imagine what the shows in this once impressive theater were like. Needless to say, when I finally had the chance to go inside, all I saw were rubble, rubbish, ruins, and the ghost of the beauty that was once held within its walls.

Credits: plasticpopsicle

Still, I think there’s something about these lonely — even scary — spaces that leads photographers like Riccardo Parenti (who took photos around an abandoned Japanese mining town called Nichitsu), and even our fellow lomographers like atropaworkshop (take a look at his awesome album of photos taken inside an abandoned building in his hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria) to seek these places and tell the stories behind them. At least, those that they can tell from what’s left in these ruins.

My co-editor chooolss during our visit last month. We’ll be back this coming Sunday to take more photos. I bet she’ll be a constant companion of mine whenever I get the itch to visit this abandoned theater.

I feel sad that my generation never got to see it in its heydays, and we’re only left with stories from books, old pictures, and historians. I certainly feel lucky that my parents, who moved to Manila around the 1970s, still caught a glimpse of the Metropolitan Theater after it was meticulously restored in 1978, and thus were able to tell me a few stories about it. So, maybe, it’s that desire to tell the story today in my own way, my own lens(es), and my own perspective that drives me to keep coming back. I just hope my eyes, heart, and mind are open wide enough so I don’t miss these remaining tales.

Take a look at the rest of my photos around Manila Metropolitan Theater here, here, and here.

written by plasticpopsicle on 2014-04-21 #news #ruins #manila #monday-moodboard #monday-moodboard-plasticpopsicle #manila-metropolitan-theater #abandoned-spaces

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