Images from the New York Times photoessay “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” by Edgar Martins.
Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years but then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.
The abandoned or stalled developments—and Martins’s photos of them—can be seen as a signs of the hubris (and occasional criminality) that typified the boom and the economic and human damage that remained in its wake.
