Dark side

People wander through such places for different reasons. For me, first and foremost, it was an opportunity to walk where there were no people. It was also a chance to look inside places you would never normally enter and see how people lived, worked, and spent their leisure time many years ago - something akin to the archaeology of recent history. The process of finding new places, first on maps and then on the ground, was exciting in its own way too.

At times it was one person’s meta-project; at others, it was the result of numerous journeys and wanderings by a team of like-minded people whose members changed over the years.

Most of the buildings and places shown in these photographs no longer exist or, to put it mildly, look very different today.

This website is therefore a kind of museum, a time capsule left out in the open internet. Mindfuck.pp.ru first appeared online in 2010 with the same subject matter, then lay dormant for a while, and is now alive again. Many of these albums were recovered from old hard drives. The originals of some albums were lost forever and had to be reconstructed from social media copies.