TITLE: Abandoned and decaying architecture: ruined churches

There are many villages completely abandoned, lost and destroyed forever, in which their houses and churches are in an advanced state of ruin and deterioration. In most of cases, these ruined buildings will be irrecoverable, but all the photographs that I have done of these constructions enclose for me an indescribable beauty and harmony, notably reinforced for their monochrome vision in black and white.
All the churches that I present on this series of photographs are completely abandoned and mostly destroyed and mostly forgotten but while these decaying ruins stand, we will always be able to discover their beauty.
Perhaps one day, when these ruins have been transformed into mounds of rubble and stones, these photographs will be graphic documents that will allow us to remember the beauty of these dilapidated churches.
These photographs are a heartfelt tribute to an architecture that will be lost, since sooner rather than later these churches will be just a memory of what was there

AUTHOR: Ricardo Delabat (Spain)

Ricardo Delabat is an amateur photographer who lives in Madrid and since childhood he remembers his father during the summer holidays with his Voigtländer Vitoret camera, taking pictures of him and the rest of the family. At the age of 8, his father gave Ricardo his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 25, with which he took his first photos, some of which he still has lovingly stored.
At the age of 25, Ricardo was able to buy his first reflex camera, the mythical Olimpus OM10, with which he took thousands of photographs of several thematic as travel, landscapes or architecture. Although at the beginning he was only photographing in color, in short time he discovered the magic of black and white photos, capable of transmitting sensations, an intensity and a beauty that can never be achieved with color photography.
And although he resisted forgetting his analogic camera, he ended up succumbing to the overwhelming commercial force of digital photography. His first DSLR was a Nikon D60, he continued with a Nikon D7100 and today he is using a full-frame format camera, Sony Alpha 7S. Initially passionate about landscapes and long exposure techniques, in recent years he has focused on photographing the hundreds of empty villages and abandoned houses in rural Spain, traveling through vast areas that make up what he defines as “abandoned Spain” (it is estimated that at present there are in Spain about 3,000 villages totally abandoned, completely empty, without people), and illustrating a cultural heritage doomed to extinction, of which sooner or later only memories and stone burial mounds will remain.
His photographs of abandoned Spain and abandoned places, which he has called "Abandographies" (abandonment & photographies), are edited always in an intense and dramatic black and white, and he has recently published a book entitled "Abandographies. Photographic memories of abandoned Spain” presenting a careful selection of his black and white photographic works of abandoned villages in Spain, including some texts in which he narrates some of his personal experiences and feelings during his travels through that abandoned Spain.
But not only towns, since any other abandoned place motivates him to carry out his “abandographies”, such as factories, warehouses or other disused, abandoned and decaying industrial buildings. For all the above, Ricardo considers himself a photographer specialized in ethnographic decadence of a dying culture and perhaps someday his photographs they will be graphic documents with which it will be possible to illustrate and remember an extinct heritage that will never return

- Awarded in Monovisions 2022 with Honorable Mention in Architecture Section
- Publication in 2021 of a book entitled "Abandographies. Photographic Memories of Abandoned Spain"