Verderben is a german noun that means decay or degenerate. As an amateur photographer I rarely get the opportunity to capture Verderben in its progression. It is the antonym of growth. Humans invest countless resources constructing the tangeable, while time, an elusive intangeable, effortlessly destroys. It is this balance in the Lord’s creation that often get overlooked or dismissed as “ugly.” Magazines use Photoshop to conceal Verderben to create beauty. True beauty lies in graceful decay.

This weekend I stumbled across a factory is Butzbach, which lies between Frankfurt and Giessen in Hessen, Germany. This factory complex proudly proclaimed that it had been open for over 100 years. By all indications, however, the factory was abandoned around 1998. My intentions were to ride around Butzbach getting better photographs of the surrounding area than I hade taken during Hessentag (a local festival). Instead I spent a good portion of the afternoon entranced by the remnants of what used to be a thriving place where people made farm equipment.

You may view some of the photos at my Flickr album here.