Read the entire article: 'Teens Portray the Forgotten, the Unheard of, and the Remnants of a Complicated City'

The sight of decrepit, abandoned buildings can evoke many different reactions. They can inspire or disgust, educate or anger, thrill or frighten. Abandoned buildings serve as a reminder of our history—as well as our disappointments—and the art created of them can paint a vivid picture of urban decay.

Being the oddball out of capital cities, Atlanta was not built on a major body of water. Instead, it grew as a central railroad hub of ill repute. It was a city of prostitution, gambling, and violence for a long time. This history must be remembered in order to fully understand its present. With a foundation built around the railroad, it was only a matter of time before the technical advancements of the Industrial Revolution made that form of transportation obsolete. Since then Atlanta has recreated its status as ‘transportation hub’ through the Hartsfield International Airport (the biggest in the states). And with the airport, the city became again a center for prostitution.

The majority of Atlanta’s history is riddled with racism, capitalist incentives, and middle class individualism, all factors that led to the ‘white flight’ into the suburbs of the 60s and 70s. Large amounts of middle and upper class taxpayers left urban residences for plush, safe suburban living, taking with them millions of tax dollars which left the city of Atlanta struggling. Decades pushed forward and the suburbs of Atlanta (especially to the North of the city) flourished as the city itself fell into disrepair. Once funded schools, public works buildings, prisons, and rail yards emptied then decayed.

The city is sprinkled with these relics of a bygone era, including the main characters of the photographs from two high school photographers, Dani Planer. (age 14, grade 9) and Devin Black. (age 17, grade 12). Through their work, Dani and Devin tell us the story of a forgotten Atlanta, an abandoned Atlanta. They use these dilapidated leftovers to explain the consequences of urban decay and shed some much needed light into the stories of the abandoned.

Dani and Devin visited and captured the brutal result of progress for four once prosperous Atlanta buildings. Their photographs bring a new curiosity to the buildings of the Pratt-Pullman Yards (225 Rogers St.), the Atlanta Prison Farm (Key Rd.), the John B. Gordon School (1192 Metropolitan Ave. SE), and the Emergency Street Repairs (1111 Hill St. SE), all of which have been left behind to rot. Dani and Devin not only encourage inquiry, but they also present their audiences with a conflict. The audience is forced to recognize the consequences of their actions, and how the propagation of the suburbs left the urban infrastructure to decay.

From 1900 to the late 1940s, the Pratt-Pullman Yards did everything from defense contracting work during WWI, regular car maintenance, and refitting of large locomotives. In 1950 Georgia Power took hold of the property to service its mass transit cars, or streetcars. The building switched hands again when the Georgia Building Authority purchased it in 1990 to run the New Georgia Railroad, a supper train that ran from Atlanta to Stone Mountain. That venture crumbled in the mid to late 1990s and the majority of the land has been inactive since. It is within the Kirkwood neighborhood of Atlanta, just five miles from downtown. Kirkwood was an early suburb of Atlanta, traveled to and from via streetcars. White flight took its toll on Kirkwood and only recently has it seen any sort of revitalization, albeit through gentrification and an influx of middle and upper-middle classes.

The Atlanta Prison Farm was a sort of experimental concept farm that assigned prisoners to work the land and raise livestock, the byproducts of which supported the prison system. It is an idea that failed due to inefficiency and the increase in outside food services. It was in operation from 1945 to 1995 and in 2009, the roof caught fire. Firefighters refused to risk their lives for such an old building and the let it burn. The building is located in the Gresham Park area of southeast Atlanta, a neighborhood comprised of mainly African American families according to the 2000 census. Gresham Park was a white neighborhood until the late 1960s.

The John B. Gordon Elementary School was built in 1909. Renamed in the 1920s, after the famed Civil War general, state senator, and the governor of Georgia (1886), the school served its neighborhood until 1995. In 1997, the property was purchased to become lofts, but sat empty until it went into foreclosure in 2009. Located in East Atlanta, the Gordon School is located in a very actively gentrifying neighborhood.

The Emergency Street Repairs building has a much more forgotten past. Its history is completely voiceless. While many Atlantans complain about the shoddy roads in the city, what they fail to understand is that the majority of the people who use those roads do not reside in that county. The taxes that could be used to fix the roads, and keep places like the Emergency Street Repairs open, have been transplanted in the suburbs. This building is positioned in the Peoplestown area of the city that has a complex racial history. Initially established in 1885 with white, integrated, and black areas, whites began leaving the area in the 1920s and 30s due to mobility. And they continued to leave throughout the years, leaving it now a majority black neighborhood.

One of the most important elements to this body of work is the age of the photographers. They are teenagers who live in Atlanta. Dani and Devin are two youths who have discovered the anomalousness of these buildings and captured the dilapidated, the obsolete, the discarded. The number of abandoned buildings they encounter daily are innumerable, but that is life for them. They have a relationship with these buildings, as polar opposites, as artists, and as citizens.