Australia’s No 1 Urbex Photographer on 20 Years of Abandoned Spaces

From Australia’s forgotten towns to Japan’s forsaken love hotels, Shane Thoms is no stranger to abandoned places. The Melbourne-based photographer has been uncovering, visiting and documenting some of the world’s lesser-known ruins since the 90s—exploring the eerily quiet places that humans have left behind, in an attempt to capture the strange beauty of desertion.

Over the past 20 years Thoms has developed his own map of abandoned places, charting the unbeaten path of his decades-long career as an urbex photographer. Now he’s compiled the visual records of those adventures in his new book, Abandoned Australia: a photographic collection of uninhabited across his home country.

From his home, Thoms spoke to VICE about the making…