Manipulating memory: x3

Old but not forgotten? Derelict farmhouse, O’Neils Road, Waitakere. Image: Su Leslie, 2016. Edited with Snapseed and Stackables.

The more that I am assailed by the shiny new trash that shores up our consumerist society, the more I find real beauty in the old, the battered, the places and objects in decline.

On any road-trip, the New Zealand landscape offers up glimpses of past lives and old endeavours. Farm cottages, shearing sheds, the single-pump garage that kept people in small towns connected; so much has been abandoned as populations drift toward cities and rural communities are dismantled.

The structure remains, but the memories of life, love, laughter and pain have been lost to time. Derelict farmhouse, O’Neils Road, Waitakere, NZ. Image: Su Leslie, 2016. Edited with Snapseed and Stackables.

This week at Sally D’s Mobile Photography Challenge the focus is on editing and processing images. For me, it’s about trying to convey the beauty and sadness I find in a tiny piece of New Zealand’s past.

Fading from the mind’s grasp; like a dream on waking. Derelict farmhouse, O’Neils Road, Waitakere, NZ. Image: Su Leslie, 2016. Edited with Snapseed and Stackables.

The irony of this abandoned house is that the city is moving outwards, swallowing the farmland that once sustained it. Out of focus on the right of the shot there is a new housing estate filling up with people paving over the orchards and grazing land that once would have fed them.