Still available at: www.amazon.com
In post-colonial Africa, White Elephant was the name given to buildings erected with international money and never put to use; relics of an enormous waste. Europe has its own fair share of such mammoths: a practically unused railway station designed by Santiago Calatrava near Lyon, the frame of an Aldo Rossi shopping mall in Berlin, a lonely feeder road in the middle of nowhere, now slowly being reclaimed by nature … On his search for new developments in ruins, the Swiss photographer Christian Helmle discovered a vast amount of monumental solitary buildings and complexes throughout Europe’s cities and countrysides.Relieved of their original functions, the barren structures have lost any connection to their environments, appearing alien and surreal. Through Christian Helmle’s shots they develop their own individual, touchingly melancholic aesthetic.