"A Hunger for Desolate Places"

I generally avoid humans and their creations in my photographs. When buildings, and other human-made items appear, however, they often rusty, dilapidated, deteriorating or overgrown. Such as this house upon which I stumbled once outside of Spokane, WA. I don't know who owns the property or what, but this house has been there for as long as I can remember. Looking at this picture reminds me of severe foot pain - it seems that every time I walk down this road, (often in sandals due to the summer heat), the bottoms of my feet get ripped to shreds. It's not as though that always happens when I take long walks in my sandals, so perhaps the road is cursed. Or maybe gravel gets in my sandals.

Interestingly, getting back to the point, this picture is part of a pattern, I just realized. My man-made picture subjects tend to be run-down, overgrown, or otherwise lonely and abandoned-looking (this next one from my grandparents' house in central WA):

Or even this - the natural growth is very lush, but something about the staircase seems abandoned. Not forlorn per se, but consumed by the forest. This one was from Carkeek Park in Seattle, on one of the rare days last June when it didn't rain:

And that's just a few of them. What's going on?? Not all of my pictures of human-made subjects look like this, but many of them do, perhaps even a majority. Certainly a majority of the ones I would consider "good."

I went through trying to see if I had any similar trends in my strictly nature photos. I could not find very good examples; my subject matter in that case is much more seasonally determined, with a preference for alive-looking subjects during the growing season. Most of my dead-looking pictures are either from dry parts of the summer (e.g. dormant grass) or from the winter, and I've been taking less dead-looking pictures lately. Some of my pictures convey a sense of solitude/loneliness, although the theme isn't as strong as it is with human-made objects.

I think this pattern is common to a lot of photographers, taking pictures of rusty, abandoned, and decrepit human creations. Do photographers, especially nature-oriented photographers, take a subliminally pessimistic view of man-made items, focusing on decay?

This doesn't have to be entirely morbid and pessimistic, though. This seems more likely to me: the old and run-down can be intriguing, because it is shrouded in mystery. For instance, what is that old house doing there in that field? What was it in its heyday, why was it abandoned, and why is it still there? In its ambiguity, it stimulates the imagination and stirs insatiable curiosity.