One Saturday morning in May of 2025, I grabbed my camera, tossed my gear into the Amelia’s Ford Bronco Sport, and headed out with my friends Luke and Maddie—the same Luke who runs Luke Explores — to chase down whatever forgotten places we could find tucked away between the cracks of the world.

No plan. No polished itinerary. Just a full tank of gas, a stubborn will, and the kind of trust you only find between real friends who know how to read each other’s silences. What we stumbled into wasn’t just ruins—it was memory, still clinging to the rusted-out bones of machinery, sun-bleached catwalks, and handwritten warnings slapped onto panels that haven’t whispered to life in decades. Everything was still there, in a way—the noise, the tension, the fight to matter—just frozen, waiting for someone to notice.

This isn’t a series about abandonment for the sake of aesthetic decay. It’s a series about survival.
About the parts of ourselves that refuse to quit, even when the world turns its back and moves on. It’s about the chairs we leave behind when we can’t sit still any longer.
It’s about the signs we post on our broken places, daring someone to misunderstand us.
It’s about walking through wreckage and finding, somehow, that you still know how to stand.

Luke and Maddie were right there with me—wandering the twisted catwalks and frozen pump panels—moving the way you only move when you’re with people who get it without needing it explained. Their presence grounded the work. The quiet patience, and wild spirit are stitched into every frame, even the ones my friends aren’t in.

Photography, for me, has never been about chasing perfection.
It’s about standing in the mess and the dust and the sharp edges and bearing witness to what’s left behind—without trying to fix it, polish it, or lie about what it cost.

Fitchburg Water Treatment Facility isn’t just a photo series.
It’s a love letter to resilience.
It’s a middle finger to forgetting.
It’s a survival map, scrawled in rust and shadow, for anyone who ever had to keep going when everything around them told them to sit the hell down and shut up.

I am still standing.
These images are proof.

— Emily Slatin