How it all Began

Around 2009, I had gotten my first camera that was a step up from a point and shoot, not quite a D-SLR, but it had many of the functions of a D-SLR camera. I had also enrolled in photography classes in college and was finding my way with what subjects to photograph.

One day after class at San Jose State University,  I was driving around the outskirts of Downtown and saw this boarded up church along a busy stretch of Delmas Street. I parked and began to take some photos of the church from the street side and along the sidewalk.

There also happened to be some workers within the property, working to secure the building with boards. They saw me taking photos of the church through the fence and began talking to me. I was invited inside the property to be able to take better photos of the church from the other side of the fence while they worked to board up and secure the buildings. I was unable to go inside the church but it was still good to have been able to have gotten these exterior photographs.

The church was supposed to be relocated on the property and redone as part of a then proposed residential project to be built on most of the property. I was grateful to have had the opportunity to go into this property and be able to photograph it as it was at the time. These are among the earliest photographs I had taken of an abandoned building and all these years later they still echo with me as this is what started my interest in abandoned places in San Jose and surrounding areas.

They also served as documentation of not only an abandoned place that many did not pay much attention to but of places that I would soon learn disappeared almost as fast as they went abandoned over the course of my photography around San Jose. In the early morning hours of March 2010, the very church I had photographed in December 2009 caught fire, destroying the entire structure as seen at right. The burnt out remains sat for a few months before the building was cleared and the property has since sat to this day as a open field, only living on through the photos I had taken.