(CNN) – Brett Patman didn’t start out as a photographer.
He started his career as a salesman, working in some of Australia’s factories, power stations and other places of business. But photography has always been his passion.
“I bought my camera in 2011 and I didn’t know what to do,” Patman explains. “I’m starting out like taking pictures of the sky and the city and the usual card pictures that everyone has seen a million times. I just fixed my brain to think. ‘What could be more exciting than this?’ “
It turned out that the answer was hidden from the public eye.
Patman began recording some of his visits to business sites. But an unused site that caught his attention – the abandoned Bradmill Denim factory in Yarraville, a suburb of Melbourne.
He went to an open part of the yard and started to take pictures. What he didn’t know then was that he was setting his life on a new path.
Since 2011, Patman has traveled to abandoned locations around Australia to take photographs – not just factories, but hotels, woolen houses, a previously homeless camp and more. me. Now it’s his full -time job.
Walk on the memorial trail
After Patman released his photographs from the closed Wangi Museum in New South Wales, the dribble of thoughts went to the water.
“There’s this engagement of the workers and the families and the families of the workers and the brothers and the mothers and the fathers and everyone is just playing and saying,‘ Yeah, look. I worked in that room. Do you remember Bob who ran the store? God, he was hard to work, ‘”Patman said.
A boiler from Wangi Power Station, completed in 1986.
Brett Patman / The Lost Company
But good memories are not limited to every location.
One of Patman’s biggest controversies was Callan Park Hospital for Insane, Sydney’s first hospital. A government commissioner in the hospital found a widespread culture of abuse living there.
At an event where Patman was showing some of his paintings, a woman in the audience told the audience that her brother had been abused there and that it was not appropriate to take artistic photographs of the area. that evil may be done.
Patman understands a lot of the terrible things that happened in Callan Park, but believes it’s important to document the crime as well as the good.
“I think record keeping is important,” he said. “If it encourages people who have a piece of that story to come out and say something, then, to me, that’s right.”
