For over a decade, New York-based photographer Bryan Sansivero has been documenting a hidden side of America—abandoned homes that stand as weathered monuments to lives once lived. His latest book, "America the Abandoned: Captivating Portraits of Deserted Homes," showcases a decade-long journey through forgotten residences across the United States, each telling its own story of departure and decay.
The houses Sansivero photographs carry an unmistakably haunting quality. Victorian-era turrets sit with boarded windows, their once-grand porticos now feature peeling paint on towering composite columns, and wraparound verandas that may have once hosted evening cocktails and leisurely Sunday mornings now stand barren and empty. Walls crumble under the weight of time, roofs collapse from neglect, and nature slowly reclaims what humans left behind.
What sets Sansivero's work apart is his focus on homes that were never properly emptied—creating what he calls "time capsules" of American life. Inside these deserted structures, from simple clapboard farmsteads to palatial Antebellum-era plantation houses and ornate Queen Anne-style mansions, he has discovered rooms frozen in time. Musty libraries remain filled with books, papers, and photographs, with coffee mugs sitting unretrieved as if their owners just stepped away. Grand pianos collect dust alongside half-empty liquor bottles, while children's playrooms scattered with colorful toys create an unsettling sense of interrupted childhood.
"It's about capturing these time capsules; these lost places," Sansivero explained in a recent phone interview. "I like the mystery of not knowing what you're going to find." This sense of discovery has driven his work since his college days as a film studies major, when he first began documenting abandoned spaces at the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, a disused psychiatric hospital on Long Island that served as the subject of his documentary thesis.
Over time, Sansivero found himself increasingly drawn to private residences, particularly as urban exploration—commonly known as "urbex"—became a highly monetized form of social media content. He describes the phenomenon as having evolved into something resembling a competitive sport, where abandoned hospitals, churches, and schools are easily found and frequently photographed. Houses, by contrast, offer a sense of genuine discovery that appeals to his artistic sensibilities.
"If you go viral, you can get two million likes and hundreds of thousands of followers, and people are trying to chase that," he observed, noting how the pursuit becomes focused on "the most views, the biggest and the best and all of that." In response to this trend, Sansivero has deliberately moved in the opposite direction, embracing a slow and deliberate methodology using medium-format film photography, despite maintaining an Instagram following of over 100,000 people. "For me, I've just been going backwards. I want to shoot more film. I want to shoot less digital, with an emphasis on using older, unique equipment."
The homes Sansivero documents are not always pristine time capsules. Many have suffered destruction or vandalism from squatters, teenagers, or other urban explorers. Occasionally, he receives tips about promising locations only to arrive and find them already crowded with other photographers and content creators racing to capture the same images. However, he often discovers his most compelling subjects by chance or through careful research using tools like Google Earth, taking week-long trips to the American South and Midwest—regions particularly affected by industrial decline and various economic or environmental pressures.
These explorations come with significant risks that Sansivero has learned to navigate over the years. He has inhaled dangerous mold spores and now carries protective masks, has had his leg break through rotting floorboards, and has felt the unsettling sway of structures seemingly on the verge of collapse. Despite these hazards, he remains undeterred, drawn to dramatic architecture and the eccentric or historically significant collections he discovers—rooms stacked high with vintage dollhouses, mannequins positioned throughout houses like silent ghosts, or interiors still decorated for Christmases from decades past.
"I can find a dozen or more houses exploring in a day and not want to photograph anything, because it's an empty shell or it's been trashed—it's not telling a story about the previous owner," Sansivero explained. "I'm interested in what happened, why it was left like this." This curiosity drives him to research the histories of the houses he photographs, though in his published work, he shares limited details, providing just enough context to convey who lived there while maintaining anonymity and avoiding the social media tendency to exploit or sensationalize tragic stories.
Among his most remarkable discoveries have been the former residences of notable figures including a local politician, an important fashion and textile designer, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose former home in Preston County, West Virginia, featured books stacked floor to ceiling. In one particularly disturbing case, he found a house filled with life-sized mannequin mermaids and later discovered published accounts linking the property to a serial killer with victims found in the basement. The origins and significance of the mermaids remain unknown, adding another layer of mystery to an already unsettling discovery.
That particular house came into Sansivero's viewfinder purely by chance during a road trip with a friend. The boarded-up brick property beside a highway was impossible to miss. "We were just driving down the highway, and I was like, 'Oh, look at that house,'" he recalled, illustrating how some of his most significant finds happen through simple observation and curiosity rather than careful planning.
As his American project reaches a natural conclusion with the publication of "America the Abandoned," Sansivero has begun setting his sights on international subjects, exploring châteaux and castles across Europe whose histories stretch back much further in time than their American counterparts. While this latest book may represent the end of his decade-long exploration of abandoned American homes, he suggests it's more likely a pause than a permanent conclusion to this particular body of work. After all, as Sansivero noted with characteristic understatement, time ensures there will always be more forgotten places to discover and document.
