Deserted places have a magical attraction for goths. Ruins, empty industrial halls, abandoned houses, ghost towns: here several charms come together. These places have a rich past full of history and stories. At the same time, nature reclaims these places and offers an image of the past and transience. A classic vanitas motif, where it becomes clear that you cannot take anything with you from this world and that everything is consecrated to death and nothing exists for eternity. Goths, by the way, are not only interested in the visual, they explore the past and rummage through travel guides and texts about abandoned places.
Photo sessions at places of the past are particularly popular. What better backdrop for a model who wants to express introversion, isolation, melancholy or world-weariness? It is not uncommon for the amateur photographers of the scene to specifically target abandoned places on their holidays in order to document decay. A particularly creepy and sad motif here is the landscape around the former nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, which made the area uninhabitable in the 1980s due to an explosion. At the same time, this motif shows the dark side of humanity destroying its own living space, and is thus pure social criticism. The pictures of the abandoned places are often shown in exhibitions at Gothic festivals.