On Sunday morning, while you all sleep, have brunch, go to church or swear Meet the press, Eric Holubow sneaks into abandoned buildings. Holubow’s hobby is urban exploration – UrbEx for short – which involves entering and photographing long-empty churches, hospitals, schools and factories. UrbEx is best practiced in older cities in the East and Midwest, which are full of ruins.

Sunday mornings are UrbEx’s peak hours, as anyone who might call security or the cops is engaged in any of the aforementioned activities. It is a hazard of the pastime. Holubow was escorted out of the old Cook County Hospital by private security and given a ticket for trespassing at a Michigan mental hospital.

This Sunday, Holubow’s first target is the hematology lab in the nephrology division of the old Cook County Hospital. He thinks he knows a way in. Holubow walks down a path covered in fallen leaves, scales a metal railing and shoots at a door.

“Oh shit, they locked it down,” he growls. “It was open a long time ago.”

Holubow looks at a board covering a window.

“It’s new advice,” he observes. “It’s another way to get in. This is the game with the community. It is a known site. It is rather desirable. There’s a circular auditorium, and these tables that they put corpses on. Let’s go to the next site.

The following site is a church in Englewood: Beloved Community Christian Church, Rev. Bobby L. Rush, pastor and teacher. Rush, the South Side congressman, bought the former Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in 2005 and held services there for more than a dozen years before moving to a new site on 47^e Street. It is easy to get inside of it. He steps through a door whose pane was broken long ago, climbs a stairwell whose paint is peeling on the walls and enters the sanctuary, where a pigeon flies through an empty window. Holubow never enters a relic without his backpack, which contains a tripod and a Canon 5DSR camera. He unpacks, settles on the balcony crispy with bird droppings and begins to spin. It focuses on the altar, where an American flag is clustered at the base of the pulpit.

UrbEx photography is often considered “ruin porn”, because, as Detroiter John Patrick Leary once wrotehe “aestheticizes poverty without questioning its origins, [and] dramatizes spaces but never seeks the people who inhabit and transform them. Holubow is aware of the criticism, but believes there is a sociological lesson to be learned from the fact that an UrbEx photographer is the only Sunday visitor to a church.

“I’m not a religious man, but I still like going to church on Sundays,” says Holubow. “I’m Jewish. In Lawndale, there’s a bunch of old synagogues that were converted into Baptist churches and then abandoned. It’s socio-economic, the changing neighborhoods. When people are displaced, they don’t go there anymore. “Church. In general, people are also less religious. There has been a shift in societal values ​​of spiritual time, the way people recharge their batteries.

Holubow photographed his first urban ruins in 2005. At the time he was working as a design planner and visited his company’s factory at 35^e and Kedzie – opposite the old Washburne Trade School. Holubow was more interested in the empty school than the factory. He walked in and was “blown away by this huge abandoned building. I came back with my camera.

Soon he was discovering new sites on Meetup’s urban photography page and posting his photos online. In 2014, he published a coffee table book, Abandoned: America’s Vanishing Landscape, featuring the Packard Detroit factory on the cover and photos of the Uptown Theater inside. A second edition of the book will be released in July. His urban explorations have taken him as far south as New Orleans, where he photographed a power plant and an amusement park, and as far west as Seattle, where he snuck into breweries. and a nuclear power plant.

“It’s really exploration,” he says. “You find out stuff. Seeing how the decomposition happens and the detritus how it unfolds is fantastic. I think there is beauty here. The beauty of decadence is taking a man’s organized vision and introducing entropy: nature beats last. To see something highly organized disorganize, highly integrated disintegrate.

This is certainly the state of Holubow’s next stop, the former 21^st District police station at 29^e and Prairie, in the Douglas district. Law enforcement is all about order, but the police abandoned this messy outpost a decade ago and didn’t even bother to lock the door behind them. Holubow walks right into what appears to be an example of French furlough: posters looking for gangbangers are still pinned to a notice board, locked doors to detention cells are wide open, the CAPS mission board lists misdemeanors ten years old of narcotics, begging and commercial parking. A 2012 calendar on the floor indicates the last day on the beat here.

Then Holubow tries to get into Henson Elementary School, at age 13^e and Obverse, in North Lawndale. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 Chicago public schools in 2013, he created 50 urban exploration sites.

“Chicago has a lot of schools,” says Holubow. “The schools on the north side should be repurposed, like condos, but the schools in Lawndale, they don’t do anything with it.”

Holubow has been inside Henson before, but as he tours the building, he discovers that all of his old entry points have been boarded up. This, he says, is a consequence of the popularity and publicity of urban exploration. Like many explorers, Holubow posts his photos on Instagram, at @eholubowand on its website, ebow.org. Property managers see them and react by securing their buildings. This makes the game more difficult.

“Before, it was something they couldn’t understand,” he says. “Because of Instagram, they see children entering these places. It’s 100% harder. They are much more responsive now. Technology has enabled guardians. They have motion sensors; they don’t have to be there, but they can keep an eye on it.

After some suspicious neighbors ask him why the hell he wanted to get into this old school, Holubow decides to give up. He was out exploring when neighbors called the cops, who arrested some photographers. Holubow decides to take another chance at the Nephrology Division. He calls a fellow explorer who tells him there is an open door in an adjacent building. Holubow finds him, climbs five flights of stairs, crosses a catwalk, and descends into the anesthesiology research department. It’s exactly as he described it: there’s a surgical auditorium, where three rows of wooden bleachers surround an operating table, and an autopsy room, with three stainless steel tables for dissecting corpses. Offices are strewn with floppy disks, moving boxes filled with files slump to the floor; in a 1978 letter taped to the wall, the director of the clinic complains about the work of a clerk. Like the police station, this institution was suddenly deserted. In the early years of its abandonment it may have seemed suspended, like a museum diorama, but it is now too dilapidated to ever be rehabilitated. It is still at this point between the designs of humanity and the reconquest of nature, that the space that all urban explorers seek.