Staircase, Ospedale al Mare, © Brian Rybolt

Ospedale al Mare

It’s amazing how people can develop a sixth sense about finding what they really love.  Brian Rybolt tends to have that for old faded, interesting architectural buildings. Enchanted by photographs of the light, atmosphere and patina  of old buildings HOT reporter Lauris Morgan-Griffiths went to see what dilapidated grandeur Rybolt had found.

On a leisurely walk, tired after a day’s shooting at the Venice Biennale, Brian Rybolt fell across an amazing, decaying treasure of a sanatorium.

Hospital room, Ospedale al Mare, Brian Rybolt

Intrigued by the look of it, finding  there was no-one to stop him, he walked past an empty sentry box  and into a landscape of more and more buildings. “Doors were swinging open, it looked like a small ghost town. It felt very, very creepy, but at the same time very beautiful.   I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found a dead body lying around there.”

At that time he only had one camera, and no tripod and he photographed for four hours, went back the next day and photographed some more.  And then haunted by images of  the place he flew back ten months later to finish the project.

The photographs are seductively evocative;  monochrome, faded textures and colours, there is a beautiful quality of light and a palpable feeling of the patients.

The building had literally been abandoned and left to rot:  beds and machinery left, patients documents scattered around, an abandoned shoe,  a broken down, redundant wheel chair. And the natural world is infiltrating: greenery creeping in; water leaving damp, green mouldy marks; stains on the floor; ceilings caving in; peeling paint and overarching the decaying grandeur of it all is a gorgeous staircase.

Ospedale al Mare, Brian Rybolt

The photographs captures the essence of Venice in a different context – watery, old, decaying and intriguing.  The light, the atmospere.  Rybolt found it  “exhilarating and sad at the same time.  There are  mixed emotions in the photography  I wanted to show the human side. There are no people, only the traces of them.”

When I asked him if he was tempted to take away any mementoes from these buildings –  beside the images –  there was a short pause.  Another of his ongoing projects is documenting Dungeness and although he has been tempted to pick up some items from the beach he feels it is wrong.  However, he did rescue some family photographs from the sanitorium that had been simple left lying there, otherwise they would  simply have been destroyed.  He has scanned these and they are now part of his exhibition. Ospedale al Mare – a tribute to the building and to the patients who had been there.

Ospedale al Mare is on at Hastings Arts Forum from 25 October–6 November.  There is also a book, Ospedale al Mare, for sale. www.brianrybolt.com

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