1. Urbex Session, castle road trip by Marie & Raphael
Madame la marquise has left her castle and the beautiful abandoned residence is languishing in its park invaded by brambles. Luckily, two young urban explorers have embarked on an extraordinary challenge: to breathe new life into these forgotten worlds whose history, imaginary or real, provokes troubling feelings. With them, over the course of an unusual road trip that takes them from bourgeois houses to manors, and from manor houses to palaces, through images and stories, discover incredible buildings, sometimes intact but reduced to silence. Exceptional photos with careful aesthetics reveal the sumptuous past, the extravagances and the mysteries of these ghost castles. These vanished worlds tell the story of our society. They bear witness to the sometimes tragic fate of an abandoned French heritage and question its preservation.
2. Urbex, world heritage by MonsieurKurtis
With MonsieurKurtis, urban exploration is a journey that knows no boundaries. With a camera and projectors slung over his shoulder, he takes us on an unusual visual journey to discover inaccessible places, whether abandoned or not. Sites closed to the public, forbidden or secret, the adventure begins in Lorraine, in his native valley, and continues to the four corners of the globe. No boundaries either between rooftops (skyscrapers, bridges, church spires, etc.), underground (factories, amusement parks, car scrapyards, etc.) or basements (bunkers, catacombs, mines, subways, quarries, etc.). Inspired by video game artwork, he does not hesitate to appropriate the place by staging characters and creating fantastic or surreal atmospheres. With this book, the author forever registers 50 places as part of the world heritage of urbex, in 180 prodigious photos supported by texts which reveal the architectural and historical interest of the sites.
3. Urbex world by Jonk
Travel the world in search of dreams and poetry... From the mythical ghost town of Pripyat in the Chernobyl exclusion zone to the sand-covered houses of Kolmanskop in Namibia, via the Baikonur cosmodrome, Jonk, an adventurous photographer and urbex lover, takes us in this traveling book to discover forbidden zones, ruins devoured by time where nature is reclaiming its rights. Prisons, train stations, palaces, military buildings, discover thirty-five sites abandoned by human society and reinvested by the dreamlike magic of abandonment.
4. Vestiges of a Forgotten World by Kieron Connolly
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if humanity were to disappear? The photographs in this book give us a glimpse. Much faster than we could imagine, grass would cover the roads, trees would break through buildings, and wildlife would return to haunt our cities. Nature would reclaim its rights.
From the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to the Aral Sea, from the ruined concert halls of Detroit to the British Cold War bunkers, Vestiges of a Forgotten World reveals the fascinating stories of ghost towns, flooded shopping malls, rusting amusement park rides and abandoned railways. Embark on a journey to the heart of these sites forgotten by man through more than 150 spectacular and astonishing photographs.
5. 100 breathtaking urbex places by Eloi Rousseau
Orphanages, churches, disused factories, amusement parks, hospitals, cemeteries… All over the world, abandoned sites, left to nature, taken over by street artists, rediscovered by urban explorers…
This book offers 100 adventures to discover these amazing places where time seems to have stood still...
6. Urbex: 50 secret and abandoned places in France by Timothy Hannem
To become an urban explorer, you just have to dare... Climb a wall, take an underground passage, push a simple fence and everything changes. Forgotten and secret worlds in the heart of the city become adventure playgrounds... Just a stone's throw from home. Orphanage, church, hospital, slaughterhouse, disused factory, amusement park, college, cemetery... these abandoned sites are rediscovered today by urban explorers, these Urbex madmen. This book offers fifty adventures, fifty secret places, sometimes intact, all abandoned by human society. Clue after clue, try to locate these unusual sites where time has stopped.
7. France abandoned by David Margaine
Follow in the footsteps of the abandoned steelworks of Gandrange or the closed blast furnaces of Uckange in Lorraine, a spectacular warship cemetery on the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, a forgotten castle in the Paris region, an abandoned sanatorium in the Alps, the remains of a magnificent Art Deco concert hall in the North, a disused hospital in the South-West, a now-off-limits military fort in the Pyrenees, a closed wine cellar in Normandy...
8. Chernobyl: Post-apocalyptic visit by Laurent Michelot
April 26, 1986. The Chernobyl disaster destroyed many lives, a city, villages, a region in a few hours. It was both an ecological and human disaster, which would remain etched in the collective memory and whose scars would take more than nine hundred years to, perhaps, disappear.
Through a richly illustrated introduction with infographics and period photographs , this book sheds light, for the first time, on the utopian city of Pripyat and the Chernobyl complex, the fatal accident and the attempts to contain the tragedy.
Detailed maps of the area allow you to explore the city, its infrastructure, its homes and the surrounding villages.
Archival photographs juxtapose the present and the past, like snapshots, fragments of the lives of the men and women who once lived there.
Laurent Michelot, a passionate photographer, explores these now abandoned places through 150 unpublished photographs .
9. Baikonur: Remnants of the Soviet program
The world is full of very little-known geographical anomalies that are or have often been a source of diplomatic and/or military struggles. Many still exist under the radar and are, or could become, the source of a major international crisis.
Countries that do not really exist, the world's only town that lies entirely underground, a UK hotel room that became Yugoslavian for one day only, an island which is Spanish for six months of the year and French for the other six months, a city which is officially constituted by one single skyscraper, the world's first and only railway that belonged to one country and ran across another, a hotel room whose bedroom is in France and whose bathroom is in Switzerland, Bir Tawil which is one of the very few territories on Earth not claimed by any country, the only place in the world where you can find the so-called counter-enclaves and where in a 20-minute walk around the village you can cross an international border over 50 times at 50 different points...
10. Abandoned Places: Images of a Lost World by Henk van Rensbhergen
Henk van Rensbergen is an airline pilot. He takes advantage of his stopovers all over the world to pursue his second passion: photographing abandoned places. From a floating warship graveyard in France to a flooded theme park in New Orleans, a sanatorium in Georgia, a forgotten love hotel in Japan or a palace on an Italian lake, the author seeks the beauty of their desolation and highlights the richness of their decadence. This pocket-sized book shows his most iconic photos from the last 25 years of a hundred different places, including unpublished documents and anecdotes.
